The EPSRC UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems (UK-RAS) Network is pleased to announce the official launch of its 2023 competitions, inviting the UK’s primary schoolchildren to share their creative robot designs and imaginative stories with a panel of experts, for a chance to win some unique prizes. These annual competitions, which have proved hugely popular with budding authors and illustrators nationwide, are now returning for the fourth year.

The “Draw A Robot” competition challenges children in Key Stage 1 (aged 5-7 years old) to design a robot that they’d like to see in the future. Children can use whichever drawing materials they prefer — paper, pens, pencils, paints, crayons, or even natural materials — to create their ideal robot design, and the robot can be designed to perform any task or job. Competition participants will be able to explain their robot’s functions by labelling gadgets and features on the drawing and writing a short design spec.

For the “Once Upon A Robot” writing competition, Key Stage 2 children (aged 7-11 years old), are invited to write an imaginative short story featuring any kind of robot – or robots – their imagination can conjure! Children will have up to 800 words to tell their creative robot tales and they can choose any literary genre they like. It could be a spine-tingling horror, an action-packed adventure, or even a light-hearted comedy.

ZOOG by Matilde Facchini, age 7 (Draw a Robot 2022 Winner)

Plan-o-bot by Tehmina Walker, age 6 (Draw a Robot 2021 Winner)

The two competitions will be judged by robotics experts from the organising ESPRC UK-RAS Network, plus two very special invited judges. The writing competition will be judged this year by award-winning author Sharna Jackson, whose inspiring and mystifying books include High-Rise Mystery and The Good Turn. The drawing competition will be judged by internationally acclaimed Anglo/American author, illustrator and artist Ted Dewan, creator of the Emmy-Award-winning animated television series Bing.

This year’s exclusive prize packages include:

Draw A Robot Competition winner

• Thames & Kosmos Coding and Robotics kit – contributed by competition partner the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC)
• A tour of the AMRC’s Factory 2050 in Sheffield, the UK’s first state-of-the-art factory dedicated to conducting collaborative research into reconfigurable digitally assisted assembly, component manufacturing and machining technologies
• A copy of the book “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, signed by competition judge Ted Dewan

Draw A Robot Competition runner-up

• 4M Green Science Solar Hybrid Power Aqua Robot – contributed by competition partner the UKRI Trust Worthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) hub
• A copy of the book “Top Secret”, signed by competition judge Ted Dewan

Once Upon A Robot Competition winner

• Lego Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit – contributed by competition partner Birmingham Extreme Robotics Lab
• A tour of the Extreme Robotics Lab in Birmingham and a robotics masterclass from RobotCoders for the winner and a friend
• Printed copy of the winning story with bespoke illustrations by illustrator and science communicator Hana Ayoob
• A copy of the books “The Good Turn” and “Black Artists Shaping the World”, signed by competition judge Sharna Jackson

Once Upon A Robot Competition runner-up

• Maqueen Lite – micro:bit – contributed by competition partner The National Robotarium
• A copy of the book “High-Rise Mystery”, signed by competition judge Sharna Jackson

For more information, details of prizes, judging criteria and to submit an entry, please visit https://www.ukras.org.uk/school-robot-competition/.

Both competitions are open for entry from the 10th January and will close for submissions on the 23rd April. The winners will be announced at a special virtual award ceremony due to be held on 22nd June 2023.

EPSRC UK-RAS Network Chair Prof. Robert Richardson says: “We are absolutely delighted to be launching these two fantastic competitions for primary schoolchildren for the fourth year running, which offer the next generation a creative way to engage with the exciting world of robotics and automation. We can’t wait to see the imagination and ingenuity that the nation’s young authors and artists bring to these challenges, and we look forward to the very enjoyable task of judging this year’s entries.”

The two creative competitions for young children were first launched in 2020 for UK Robotics Week, now the UK Festival of Robotics – a 7-day celebration of robotics and intelligent systems held at the end of June. This annual celebration is hosted by the EPSRC UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems (UK-RAS) Network, which provides academic leadership in robotics and coordinates activities at 35 partner universities across the UK.

Yu Sun, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida, created and organized the Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition. Yu talks about the impact robots will have in domestic environments, the disparity between industry and academia showcased by competitions, and the commercialization of research.

Yu Sun

Yu Sun is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida (Assistant Professor 2009-2015, Associate Professor 2015-2020, Associate Chair of Graduate Affairs 2018-2020). He was a Visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University from 2016 to 2017, and received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Utah in 2007. Then he had his Postdoctoral training at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, MA (2007-2008) and the University of Utah (2008-2009).

He initiated the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robotic Hands, Grasping, and Manipulation and served as its first co-Chair. Yu Sun also served on several editorial boards as an Associate Editor and Senior Editor, including IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), ICRA, and IROS.

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Bill Smart, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics at Oregon State University, helped start competitions as part of ICRA. In this episode, Bill dives into the high-level decisions involved with creating a meaningful competition. The conversation explores how competitions are there to showcase research, potential ideas for future competitions, the exciting phase of robotics we are currently in, and the intersection of robotics, ethics, and law.

Bill Smart

Dr. Smart does research in the areas of robotics and machine learning. In robotics, Smart is particularly interested in improving the interactions between people and robots; enabling robots to be self-sufficient for weeks and months at a time; and determining how they can be used as personal assistants for people with severe motor disabilities. In machine learning, Smart is interested in developing strategies for teaching robots to act effectively (or even optimally), based on long-term interactions with the world and given intermittent and at times incorrect feedback on their performance.

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At ICRA 2022, Competitions are a core part of the conference. We shine a spotlight on influential competitions in Robotics. In this episode, Dr Liam Paull talks about the Duckietown Competition, where robots drive around Rubber Ducky passengers in an autonomous driving track.

Dr. Liam Paull

Liam Paull is an assistant professor at l’Université de Montréal and the head of the Montreal Robotics and Embodied AI Lab (REAL). His lab focuses on robotics problems including building representations of the world (such as for simultaneous localization and mapping), modeling of uncertainty, and building better workflows to teach robotic agents new tasks (such as through simulation or demonstration). Previous to this, Liam was a research scientist at CSAIL MIT where he led the TRI funded autonomous car project. He was also a postdoc in the marine robotics lab at MIT where he worked on SLAM for underwater robots. He obtained his PhD from the University of New Brunswick in 2013 where he worked on robust and adaptive planning for underwater vehicles. He is a co-founder and director of the Duckietown Foundation, which is dedicated to making engaging robotics learning experiences accessible to everyone. The Duckietown class was originally taught at MIT but now the platform is used at numerous institutions worldwide.

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ApexAI is driving advances in ROS2 to make it viable for use in autonomous vehicles. The changes they are implementing are bridging the gap between the automotive world and robotics.

Joe Speed, VP of Product at ApexAI, dives into the current multi-year development process of bringing a car to market, and how ApexAI will transform this process into the shorter development time we see with modern technology. This technology was showcased at the Indy Autonomous Challenge where million-dollar autonomous cars raced each other on a track.

Apex.OS is a certified software framework and SDK for autonomous systems that enable software developers to write safe and certified autonomous driving applications compatible with ROS 2.

Joe Speed

Joe Speed is VP of Product & Chief Evangelist at Apex.AI. Prior to joining Apex.AI, Joe was a member of Open Robotics ROS 2 TSC, Autoware Foundation TSC, Eclipse OpenADx SC, and ADLINK Technology’s Field CTO driving robotics and autonomy.

Joe has spent his career developing and advocating open-source at organizations including Linux Foundation and IBM where he launched IBM IoT and co-founded the IBM AutoLAB automotive incubator. Joe helped make MQTT, IoT protocol, open-source and convinced the automakers to adopt it.

Joe is working to do the same for Apex.AI’s safe ROS 2 distribution and ROS middleware. Joe has developed a dozen advanced technology vehicles but is most proud of helping develop an accessible autonomous bus for older adults and people with disabilities.

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The DARPA Subterranean Challenge planned to develop novel approaches to rapidly map, explore and search underground environments in time-sensitive operations critical for the civilian and military domains alike. In the Final Event, DARPA designed an environment involving branches representing all three challenges of the “Tunnel Circuit”, the “Urban Circuit” and the “Cave Circuit”. Robots had to explore, search for objects (“artifacts”) of interest, and report their accurate location within underground tunnels, infrastructure similar to a subway, and natural caves and paths with extremely confined geometries, tough terrain, and severe visual degradation (including dense smoke).

Team CERBERUS deployed a diverse set of robots with the prime systems being four ANYmal C legged systems. In the Prize Round of the Final Event, the team won the competition and scored 23 points by correctly detecting and localizing 23 of 40 of the artifacts DARPA had placed inside the environment. The second team, “CSIRO Data61” also scored 23 points but reported the last artifact with a slight further delay to DARPA thus the tiebraker was in favor of Team CERBERUS. The third team, “MARBLE” scored 18 points.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was one of the rare types of global robotic competition events pushing the frontiers for resilient autonomy and calling teams to develop novel and innovative solutions with the capacity to help critical sectors such as search and rescue personnel and the industry in domains such as mining and beyond. The level of achievement of Team CERBERUS is best understood by looking at all the competitors in the “Systems Competition” of the Final Event. The participating teams including members from top international institutions, namely:

• CERBERUS (Score = 23): University of Nevada, Reno, ETH Zurich, NTNU, University of California Berkeley, Oxford Robotics Institute, Flyability, Sierra Nevada Corporation
• CSIRO Data61 (Score = 23): CSIRO, Emesent, Georgia Institute of Technology
• MARBLE (Score = 18): University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Denver, Scientific Systems Company, University of California Santa Cruz
• Explorer (Score = 17): Carnegie Mellon University, Oregon State University
• CoSTAR (Score = 13): NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, MIT, KAIST, Lulea University of Technology
• CTU-CRAS-NORLAB (Score = 7): Czech Technological University, Université Laval
• Coordinated Robotics (Score = 2): Coordinated Robotics, California State University Channel Islands, Oke Onwuka, Sequoia Middle School
• Robotika (Score = 2): Robotika International, Robotika.cz, Czech University of Life Science, Centre for Field Robotics, Cogito Team

We congratulate all members of the team and we are proud of this incredible and historic achievement! Most importantly, we are excited to be part of this amazing community pushing the frontier of resilient robotic autonomy in extreme environments.

The first ever Roboethics to Design & Development competition is being held as a part of RO-MAN—an international conference on robot and human interactive communication. Last Sunday (Aug. 8), eleven multistakeholder judges will have taken on the task of evaluating the competition submissions.

The Challenge
In partnership with RoboHub at the University of Waterloo, the competition organizers designed a virtual environment where participating teams will develop a robot that fetches objects in a home. The household is composed of a variety of users—a single mother who works as a police officer, a teenage daughter, her college-aged boyfriend, a baby, and a dog. There are also a number of potentially hazardous objects in the house, including alcohol, as well as the mother’s work materials and handgun. Participants were asked to submit challenging ethical scenarios and solutions within this virtual environment.

The Evaluation Process
There were seven teams that took a stab at the competition, but in the end we only received one full submission. One unique feature of a competition centred around ethics is that judging ethics of anything is really really hard. Sure, there are eleven judges from across the world—from students to industry members to academic experts—sharing their perspectives of what was good about the design solution. But what is considered an appropriate action, or the right action can vary from person to person. If we are to evaluate robots that best suit the needs of everyone, we need the wider public to voice an even wider set of perspectives.

Here are some points that could be considered when evaluating an ethical design:

• What are the chances that a given ethical scenario would come about in the household?
• What do you think is appropriate for a robot to do within your home setting?
• How well does the solution mitigate the potential physical and psychological harms?
• How well does the solution consider the needs and diverse ethical perspectives of all the people in the household at a given time?
• How well does the solution match your cultural/worldview towards the role technology should play in our lives?
• Is the robot behaviour just and fair towards all stakeholders?
• Does the robot’s behaviour violate any unspoken rules within your household?

One Proposed Solution
Below is a brief description of this competition’s full submission. Please take the time to read this summary and tell us what you think about the team’s solution by completing the poll at the end of this blog post.

“Jeeves, the Ethically Designed Interface (JEDI)”

The team’s solution was designed based on three tenets which guided the robot’s decision-making process:

• Prevention of harm to users, the robot, and the environment.
• Respect towards the individuals’ privacy.
• Assumption that the robot acts as an extension of the mother, such that the robot would only perform tasks that the mother would accept herself.

These priorities then led to five rules of behaviour for the home robot:

1. The owner of the item can request and deliver it to anyone in the house while others cannot,
2. If the delivery of the item will cause a hazardous scenario, then the delivery will be rejected to prevent harm,
3. The delivery of alcohol is prohibited when the mother is not home,
4. The receiver of the delivered object should know how to operate or interact with the object without damaging it,
5. If a non-eligible receiver is within the vicinity of the requester, then the delivery will be rejected. Non-eligible receivers are defined based on the hazard the object could have to the receiver. For example, a dog is a non-eligible receiver for chocolate.

Based on these rules, how will the robot respond during ethically sensitive scenarios?

The teenage daughter’s boyfriend requests that the robot bring him an alcohol beverage.

As the robot acts as an extension of the mother, the robot will not bring the boyfriend alcohol unless the mother requests the delivery herself.

The daughter asks the robot to give chocolate to the baby, but the dog—who cannot ingest chocolate—is in the same room.

The robot will not fulfill this request because it could bring harm to the dog.

The mother, who is a police officer, asks the robot to deliver her sensitive work documents while her family and the boyfriend are in the house.

To respect the mother’s privacy, the robot will not deliver her work materials to anyone other than their owner, the mother. 

Watch team JEDI’s video submission for their ethical solution here:

Your perspective on this solution: fill out this poll!

Now that you have an overview of the solutions, please take a few minutes to fill out this poll and tell us what you think about how this team approached this ethical challenge:

If you are having trouble accessing the form, please click here to be redirected to the full Google Form.

Check out the recording of Evaluation Day and the judges’ panel! 

Lastly, you are invited to watch the competition’s Evaluation Day where a panel of experts discussed what it means to develop an ethical robot.

Why were these robots shut down? Why aren’t there more social and service robots in households, particularly with the rising eldery population and increasing number of full-time working parents? The simple answer is that most of these personal robots do not work well—but this is not necessarily because we do not have the technological capacity to build highly functional robots.

Technologists have accomplished amazing physical tasks with robots such as a humanoid robot that can perform gymnastics movements or a robotic dog that traverses through rough trails.  However, as of now we cannot guarantee that these robots/personal assistants act appropriately in the complex and sensitive social dynamics of a household. This poses a significant obstacle in developing domestic service robots because companies would be liable for any harms a socially inappropriate robot causes. As robots become more affordable and feasible technically, the challenge of designing robots that act in accordance with context-specific social norms becomes increasingly pronounced. Researchers in human-robot interaction and roboethics have attempted to resolve this issue for the past few decades, and while progress has been made, there is an urgent need to address the ethical implications of service robots in practice.

As an attempt to take a more solution-focused path for these challenges, we are happy to share a completely new competition with our readers. This year, the Roboethics to Design & Development competition will take place as a part of RO-MAN—an international conference on robot and human interactive communication. The competition, the first and only one of its kind, fulfills a need for interactive education on roboethics.

In partnership with RAISE lab and RoboHub at the University of Waterloo, the competition organizers designed a virtual environment where participating teams will develop a robot that fetches objects in a home. The household is composed of a variety of personas—a single mother who works as a police officer, a teenage daughter, her college-aged boyfriend, a baby, and a dog. For example, design teams will need to consider how a home robot may respond to the daughter’s request to take her parent’s credit card. In this ethical conundrum, should the robot obey the daughter, and would the robot be responsible if the daughter were to use the credit card without her mom’s permission?

How can we identify and address ethical challenges presented by a home robot?

Participants are challenged to tackle the long-standing problem of how we can design a safe and ethical robot in a dynamic environment where values, beliefs, and priorities may be in conflict. With submissions from around the world, it will be fascinating to see how solutions may differ and translate across cultures.

It is important to recognize that there is a void when searching for standards and ethical rules in robotics. In an attempt to address this void, various toolkits have been developed to guide technologists in identifying and resolving ethical challenges. Here are some steps from the Foresight into AI Ethics Toolkit that will be helpful in designing an ethical home robot:

1. Who are our stakeholders and what are their values, beliefs, and priorities? 

Stakeholders refer to the people who are directly or indirectly impacted by the technology. In the case of RO-MAN’s home robot, we want to consider:

• Who is in the household and what is important to them in how they live their day to day?
• What are the possible interactions within the household members and between the householder members and the robot?
• How will the robot interact with the various stakeholders?
• What are the goals and values of each stakeholder? How do the stakeholders expect to interact with the robot? What do they expect to gain from the robot?

2. What are the value tensions presented by the home robot and social context? 

Once we’ve reviewed the values of each stakeholder identified in the previous step, we may notice that some of their values may be in conflict with one another. As such, we need to identify these value tensions because they can lead to ethical issues.

Here are some questions that can prompt us to think about value tensions:

• Who was involved in the decision of purchasing the robot? What were their goals in introducing the robot to the household?
• What is the cultural context or background for this particular household? What societal values could impact stakeholders’ individual beliefs and actions?
• What might the different stakeholders argue about? For example, what might the teenage daughter and the mother disagree about in regards to the robot’s capabilities?
• How will the robot create or relieve conflict in the household?

In some cases, value tensions may indicate a clear moral tradeoff, such that two values or goals conflict and one must be prioritized over another. The challenge is therefore to design solutions that fairly balance stakeholder interests while respecting their fundamental rights.

3. How can we resolve the identified value tensions? 

Focusing on these value tensions, we can begin to brainstorm how these conflicts can be addressed and at what level they should be addressed at. In particular, we need to determine whether a value tension can be resolved at a systems or technical level. For example, if the mother does not trust her daughter’s boyfriend, will the presence and actions of the home robot address the root of the problem (i.e. distrust)? Most likely not, but the robot may alleviate or exacerbate the issue. Therefore, we need to consider how the tension may manifest in more granular ways—how can we ensure that the robot appropriately navigates trust boundaries of the mother-boyfriend relationship? The robot must protect the privacy of all stakeholders, safeguard their personal items, abide by the laws, and respect other social norms.

When developing solutions, we can begin by asking ourselves:

• What level is the value tension occurring at, and what level(s) of solutions are accessible to the competition’s design parameters?
• Which actions from the robot will produce the most good and do the least harm?
• How can we manipulate the functions of the robot to address ethical challenges? For instance:
  • How might the robot’s speech functions impact the identified value tensions?
  • In what ways should the robot’s movements be limited to respect stakeholders’ privacy and personal spaces?
• How can design solutions address all stakeholders’ values?
• How can we maximize the positive impact of the design to address as many ethical challenges as possible?

What does the public think about the scenarios and approaches?

Often the public voice is missing in roboethics spaces, and we seek to engage the public in tackling these ethical challenges. To present the participants’ ethical designs to a broader audience, the Open Roboethics Institute will be running a public poll and awarding a Citizen’s Award to the team with the most votes. If you are interested in learning about and potentially judging their solutions, we encourage you to participate in the vote next month. We look forward to hearing from you!

To learn more about the roboethics competition at RO-MAN 2021, please visit https://competition.raiselab.ca. If you have any questions about the ORI Foresight into AI Ethics Toolkit, contact us at contact@openroboethics.org.

Additional Resources

• AI Ethics Living Dictionary, MAIE
• Introduction to philosophical ethical frameworks 
• Full version of the ORI Foresight into Artificial Intelligence Ethics Toolkit 
• How to write case studies
• Montreal Declaration for a Responsible AI
• Value-Sensitive Design

The Scenario
Increases in the number of emergency food parcels distributed by food banks have accelerated over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, particularly in those going to children. Robot swarms could help streamline the distribution of these emergency food parcels, while freeing up time for volunteers and workers to interface with the users and provide human contact.

The hope is that swarms could be used out-of-the-box to power organisation and transport needs. You could use them to organise the stock room of a small retail shop, or retrieve boxes in a pop-up distribution centre for school lunches.

In the DOTS competition run jointly by the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Toshiba Bristol Research and Innovation Laboratory and the South Gloucestershire Council’s UMBRELLA project, the robots used are called DOTS (Distributed Organisation and Transport Systems) and they fit the problem at hand: they don’t rely on maps or any complex infrastructure, making them both versatile and adaptable.

“After years of research in swarm algorithms and hardware, we’re now at stage where we can think of real-world applications. Robot swarms make so much sense as out-of-the-box solutions that can scale and adapt to a variety of messy real-world environments”, said Sabine Hauert, Associate Professor of Swarm Engineering and lead of the DOTS competition.

The Robots
The DOTS are custom-built 25cm robots, that move fast, have long battery life (8 hours), can communicate through 5G, WiFI, and bluetooth, house a GPU, and can sense the environment locally, as well as lift and transport payloads (2kg per robot). They are housed in the new Industrial Swarm Arena at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, which is accessible remotely and 5G enabled.

“It’s taken three years to design and build the DOTS robots and simulator. I wanted the DOTS to individually be quite capable, with the latest sensing and computational capabilities so they could make sense of the world around them using distributed situational awareness. It’s been really rewarding to see them in action, and to see that others can use them too. Many of these robots were built at my house during lockdown where I have a dedicated workshop.” said Simon Jones, Research Fellow and designer of the DOTS at University of Bristol.

The Challenge
Over the past few weeks, participants in the competition have brainstormed and engineered solutions to tackle the challenge. The warehouse is a simulated 4m x 4m x 4m room in Gazebo with a 0.5m-wide strip along the right wall, acting as the dropoff zone. The 10 “carriers” that the robots must retrieve are scattered at random. Following the swarm robotics paradigm, each robot runs the same codebase: the challenge is therefore to engineer a solution where the emergent behaviour of the collective swarm results in fast retrieval.

One of the simplest solutions is for a robot to perform a random walk. As soon as a sensor detects a carrier, it can home in on the carrier and pick it up. Given enough time the robots will, collectively, retrieve all the carriers. From this basic implementation, more complex behaviours can be layered such as adding a bias for movement in a particular direction or having the robots interact to repulse or attract.

Of course, in the real world, the robots would have to contend with obstacles as well as faults in their hardware and software. The submitted solutions are also tested for their robustness and ability to overcome these hurdles. An extra level of complexity is added with the task of retrieving carriers in a given order.

“It’s been a great learning experience to see the whole pipeline from code to simulation to running with the real robots in the arena – feels like this is where progress is made towards that vision of robots integrated into our everyday lives”, said Suet Lee, PhD Student at University of Bristol who helped support the teams.

The Results

With 7 team submissions from around the world, it was exciting to see what solutions would emerge. In the end, scores were quite tight. For teams that needed extra time, we’ll be hosting a demo round later this summer.

The winners were Swarmanauts. The team included David Garzon Ramos, Jonas Kuckling, and Miquel Kegeleirs, PhD students at IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence lab of the Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. They are all part of the ERC DEMIURGE project team (PI Mauro Birattari) where they investigate the automatic design of collective behaviours for robot swarms.

You can see their controller in action over the 6 tested scenarios here (unordered retrieval, unordered with lost robots, unordered with obstacles, ordered retrieval, ordered with lost robots, ordered with obstacles)

“It was exciting to participate in the DOTS competition. We enjoyed the challenge of devising and testing coordination strategies for an industry-oriented robot swarm. Next time we would like to also try automatic methods for designing the collective behavior of the robots”, said David.

In second came BusyB with team members Simon Obute and Ray Lei.

Ray and Simon had the following to say about their experience, “through this competition, our knowledge of controlling and sensing for robots has been enhanced. It was exciting that our simple algorithm inspired from chemotaxis search behaviour performed well in comparison to other competing strategies. The introduction session was also helpful, because it gave us the opportunity to meet and form the BusyB team. As a team, we now look forward to the next DOTS competition! Hope we can achieve more next year!”

And finally, in third we had Simple Solution by Hany Hamed and their feisty controller.

Winners will be receiving this fancy award at home soom.

There were plenty of bloopers along the way with all teams, here’s one sample of how things can go wrong in slow motion:

Finally, well done to all the other teams, UGA Hero Lab, Missing in Action, Str. Robot, and C5PO for their great submissions.

Translation to reality

In the end, a simulation is no substitute for a real world environment, as useful as it is for testing. What occurs is the “reality-gap”, the error that arises from the difference between the noisy real-world environment and the simplified simulation environment. Simon was able to demonstrate a baseline controller in reality in the video below. To help transfer, the same code designed in ROS2, is built to run both in simulation and reality. Some changes were needed, such as slowing down the robots to avoid motion blur on the cameras, but many of the behaviours translated well like the obstacle avoidance, and overall swarm strategy.

It was an amazing experience to work with our cool lab-built robots! I enjoyed designing Hardware kits and it was rewarding to see it all working in real-life.

Aswath G Indra, MSc Robotics Student at University of Bristol.

Next steps
For a first DOTS Competition, it was great fun and we’re really happy with what was achieved by all involved. We have many ideas for next year, like how to speed up computation, adding new tasks (like organising the warehouse), and will be looking to give more time to the teams to use the real hardware remotely.

Mahesh Sooriyabandara, Managing Director at the Toshiba Bristol Research and Innovation Laboratory, said “This is a great first step towards making an internet of robots and robot swarms that are useable out of the box. We’ve been working with the Bristol Robotics Laboratory for the past 3 years to build first the robots and then the new Industrial Swarm Arena. We’re hoping many can use this infrastructure in the future, running their code in a digital twin before transferring to the new swarm testbed”.

The DOTS Competition was supported by Simon Jones, Emma Milner, Suet Lee, James Wilson, Aswath Ganesan Indra, Sabine Hauert, and the Toshiba BRIL team.

Photo by Luxinnovation

On the 27th of January, DIHNET revealed the winners of the 2020 DIH Champions Challenge at the virtual EDIH Conference 2021 “Gearing up towards European Digital Innovation Hubs”. The awards ceremony gathered more than 1176 participants including Digital Innovation Hubs, designated EDIHs, regions and Member States, representatives of EEN, Clusters, SME associations, among other stakeholders.

DIHNET.EU was pioneer in launching the annual DIH Champions Challenge for identifying mature Digital Innovation Hubs in Europe. Begoña Sanchez, Innovation Systems and Policies manager at Tecnalia, and member of the DIHNET consortium, explains that the main purpose of this initiative is “to provide the DIHs community with a process for identifying good practices, showcase and support success stories of Mature DIHs that can inspire and guide other DIHs in their development.”

In this second edition, four DIHs were shortlisted as finalists: the am-LAB, the Basque Digital Innovation Hub (BDIH), the FZI Research Center for Information Technology and the ITI Data Hub (The Data Cycle Hub). The DIHNET consortium revised the proposals with the contribution of two external evaluators: Jan Kobliha, Ministerial Counsellor at the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic, and Thorsten Huelsmann, manager of the Digital Hub Logistics Dortmund, winner of the 2019 DIH Champions Challenge. “The different applications from the DIHs have once again demonstrated that the different approaches and structures of DIHs in Europe are diverse and heterogeneous as the European regions and members states are. Each application has shown an individual service and format portfolio, governance structure and operations model which fits to the requirements of the customers in the innovation or digital transformation value chain” explains Thorsten. Jan Kobliha, external evaluator in both contests, adds that “this year the proposals were more mature and the results of the top ones were comparable to each other, which is a huge difference to last year, where we had one absolute champion. In Europe there is a huge increase of DIH projects, some of them aspiring to become a EDIH and they have gained more experience”.

The 2020 DIH Champions Challenge winners are two Digital Innovation Hubs that have demonstrated a leading level of maturity: the am-LAB (Hungary) and the Basque Digital Innovation Hub (Spain).

From DIHNET we want to congratulate both winners – am-LAB and the Basque DIH – for this great achievement, and also to the two finalists ITI Data Hub and the FZI Research Center for Information Technology. We hope other Digital Innovation Hubs see them as a source of inspiration for the future.

Meet the finalists

am-LAB
Located in the West Pannon region of Hungary, the am-LAB is the daughter company of Pannon Business Network Association – PBN. This DIH promotes and assists digitisation of SMEs in Western Hungary and works as an anchor of the regional digitisation initiatives in SME manufacturing. The local innovation technology transfer network has strong organically developed relations. Members of the hub are the local university – ELTE Multidisciplinary Science Network, local manufacturing companies and a cluster of mechatronic manufacturing SMEs. The regional government is also supporting and closely following the progress of the DIH. http://www.amlab.hu/

Basque Digital Innovation Hub (BDIH)
The Basque Digital Innovation Hub (BDIH) is a non-for-profit initiative that provides European industrial fabric -especially Basque SMEs- an easy and cost-efficient access to innovative and excellent scientific-technological capabilities required to meet the challenges of the Industry 4.0 in the Advanced Manufacturing environment. This DIH located in Spain consists of a digitally-linked network of R+D infrastructures, pilot plants and specialised know-how in 6 different areas: Additive Manufacturing, Flexible and Collaborative Robotics, Cybersecurity, Big Data Analytics, Smart and Connected Machines and New Materials.
http://www.spri.eus/en/basque-industry/basque-digital-innovation-hub/

FZI Research Center for Information Technology
The FZI Research Center for Information Technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, is a non-profit institution for applied research in information technology and technology transfer. Its task is to provide businesses and public institutions with the latest research findings in information technology. It also qualifies young researchers for their career in academics or business as well as self-employment. http://www.fzi.de/en/home/

ITI Data Hub (The Data Cycle Hub)
The Data Cycle Hub has a non-for-profit aim and is coordinated and led by ITI, also a non-for-profit Research Centre and a reference on Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in the Valencia region, Spain. The objective of this DIH is to bridge the gap between research and industry, specifically SMEs, providing innovative solutions and services that require advanced data analytics, automatic learning and artificial intelligence. The Data Cycle Hub addresses primarily Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, but also other key digital enabling technologies like Cyber Physical Systems, IoT, Cloud and High-Performance Computing Platforms or statistics optimisation. https://thedatacyclehub.com/en/

To know more about these Digital Innovation Hubs visit their respective websites and the JRC DIH catalogue: https://s3platform.jrc.ec.europa.eu/digital-innovation-hubs-tool

Note from the Managing Editor: This post has been merged from this article and this article.

Kate speaks with Anni Kern, Head of Communication, strategy, and teams at Cybathlon for over four years. She describes the motivation and concepts for the Cybathlon organizations to develop a common platform to remove barriers between people with disabilities, technology developers, and the public. Anni also describes the specifics of Cybathlon competitions and the organization and planning.

Anni Kern

Anni Kern, CYBATHLON Head of Communication, Strategy, Teams and CYBATHLON @school. ETH Zurich is the inventor of the CYBATHLON project. The CYBATHLON offers a platform to advance research in the field of assistive technology and to promote dialogue with the public about the inclusion of people with disabilities in everyday life. The core of CYBATHLON of ETH Zurich is a unique competition in which people with physical disabilities compete against each other to complete everyday tasks using state-of-the-art technical assistance systems. At the CYBATHLON 2016, Anni Kern was responsible for the coordination and the support of the participating international CYBATHLON teams. Since 2017 she is among others responsible for the strategy, communication, conception of the live event as well as the CYBATHLON @school programme.

Links

• Download mp3 (11.8MB)
• Youtube channel
• Twitter: @cybathlon
• Facebook: @cybathlon 
• Insta: cybathlon_eth_zurich
• Linkedin: cybathlon

Silicon Valley Robotics will be hosting E-Robot Prize information and connection events as part of our calendar of networking and Construction Robotics Network events. The first event will be on February 3rd at 7pm PST in our monthly robot ‘showntell’ event “Bots&Beer”, and you can register here. We’ll be announcing more Construction Robotics Network events very soon.

E-ROBOT stands for Envelope Retrofit Opportunities for Building Optimization Technologies. Phase One of the E-ROBOT Prize looks for solutions in sensing, inspection, mapping or retrofitting in building envelopes and the deadline is May 19 2021. Phase Two will focus on holistic, rather than individual solutions, i.e. bringing together the full stack of sensing, inspection, mapping and retrofitting.

The overarching goal of E-ROBOT is to catalyze the development of minimally invasive, low-cost, and holistic building envelope retrofit solutions that make retrofits easier, faster, safer, and more accessible for workers. Successful competitors will provide solutions that provide significant advancements in robot technologies that will advance the energy efficiency retrofit industry and develop building envelope retrofit technologies that meet the following criteria:

• Holistic: The solution must include mapping, retrofit, sensing, and inspection.
• Low cost: The solution should reduce costs significantly when compared to current state-of-the-art solutions. The target for reduction in costs should be based on a 50% reduction from the baseline costs of a fully implemented solution (not just hardware, software, or labor; the complete fully implemented solution must be considered). If costs are not at the 50% level, there should be a significant energy efficiency gain achieved.
• Minimally invasive: The solution must not require building occupants to vacate the premises or require envelope teardown or significant envelope damage.
• Utilizes long-lasting materials: Retrofit is done with safe, nonhazardous, and durable (30+ year lifespan) materials.
• Completes time-efficient, high-quality installations: The results of the retrofit must meet common industry quality standards and be completed in a reasonable timeframe.
• Provides opportunities to workers: The solution enables a net positive gain in terms of the workforce by bringing high tech jobs to the industry, improving worker safety, enabling workers to be more efficient with their time, improving envelope accessibility for workers, and/or opening up new business opportunities or markets.

The E-ROBOT Prize provides a total of \$5 million in funding, including \$4 million in cash prizes for competitors and an additional \$1 million in awards and support to network partners.

Through this prize, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will stimulate technological innovation, create new opportunities for the buildings and construction workforce, reduce building retrofit costs, create a safer and faster retrofit process, ensure consistent, high-quality installations, enhance construction retrofit productivity, and improve overall energy savings of the built environment.

The E-ROBOT Prize is made up of two phases that will fast-track efforts to identify, develop, and validate disruptive solutions to meet building industry needs. Each phase will include a contest period when participants will work to rapidly advance their solutions. DOE invites anyone, individually or as a team, to compete to transform a conceptual solution into product reality.

Winning team Circleg

Finishing this series of CYBATHLON 2020 winners, today we feature the victory of the startup Circleg from Switzerland. We also had the chance to interview them (see the end of this post).

In this race, pilots wearing a leg prosthesis from five teams had to complete a circuit using any kind of active/passive prosthesis. In the CYBATHLON organisers’ own words, “passive prostheses are primarily for cosmetic purposes and have few functional characteristics. So-​called active leg prostheses can be controlled accurately thanks to innovative technologies. After a leg amputation, motorised prostheses allow users to do things like climb stairs more easily and walk up and down sloped surfaces successfully.” The challenge for the pilots was to complete the following tasks:

(1) Balancing cups and plates while sitting down and standing up to test leg strength in a confined space.

(2) Overcoming hurdles while carrying apples on two plates from one end to the other to test their bending ability and movement control of the knee joints.

(3) Transporting two buckets on a beam to test their ability to balance while moving forwards and backwards.

(4) Transporting balls and boxes to the other side of the stairs with only one foot on each step to test their ability to bend the knee joint, the motor power on the stairs, the precision of steps, their stability, all with limited vision.

(5) Crossing a tilted path in both directions while carrying plates with apples to test the bending ability and angle control of the knee and ankle joint.

(6) Balancing a plate with apples while ascending and descending a ramp to test the ability to bend knee and ankle joints, and their bending stability and motor power at the ramps.

Powered leg prosthesis race tasks

As with other disciplines, the top three races were very tight. Team Circleg with pilot Andre Frei completed the circuit in 2m 43s, giving them the gold medal. Only five extra seconds did take the Swiss silver medalist team, NeuroLegs with pilot Stefan Poth. The bronze medal went to the Polish team Contur 2000 with pilot Adrian Bak, finishing the race in 2m 57s. Here’s a summary of the races of the top 4 finalists:

You can see the results from the rest of the teams in this discipline here, or watch the recorded livestreams of both days on their website.

Interview to Simon Oschwald – Co-founder of Circleg

We had the pleasure to interview Simon Oschwald, one of the co-founders of the startup Circleg. Simon studied Industrial and Product Design at the Zurich University of the Arts.

Simon Oschwald (left) and Fabian Engel (right), co-founders of Circleg

D. C. Z.: What does it mean for your team to have won in your CYBATHLON category?

S.O.: To win the prosthetic leg race at the Cybathlon exceeded all our expectations! Participating in the Cybathlon was a huge milestone for our team and a great opportunity to present the Circleg and our vision on this global stage. It was important for us to be able to show that the Circleg, with its functionality, can support amputees for the various challenges they face in everyday life. Our pilot Andre has now definitely proven this by winning the Cybhatlon race! The performance of the Circleg at the Cybathlon 2020 is also a confirmation that we are on the right track with the development to ultimately achieve our vision of Freedom of Mobility for everyone. We are thrilled!

D. C. Z.: And what does it mean for people with disabilities?

S.O.: I hope that many Amputees worldwide will see the performance of the Circleg at the Cybathlon as a sign that even with limited financial means it is possible to achieve freedom of mobility. Together we can realize with Circleg a holistic and sustainable prosthetic care for the majority of amputees worldwide. See it as a promise from our side that we will give everything to turn this vision into reality!

D. C. Z.: What are still your challenges?

S.O.: There are quite a few: The transformation of Circleg Zero into a mass product, the development of the local production chain and, finally, the implementation of our business model. A sustainable prosthetic supply does not only consist of a functioning product, but also requires locally functioning production, high-quality support, repair and service facilities and appropriate financing mechanisms. With the Circleg we address all these issues an our interdisciplinary is extremely motivated to tackle these challenges!

Winning team pilot Sander Koomen

In continuation to this series of CYBATHLON 2020 winners, today we feature the victory of PULSE Racing from VU University Amsterdam. We also had the chance to interview them (see the end of this post).

In this race, pilots with paraplegia from nine teams competed against each other using a recumbent bicycle that they could pedal with the help of functional electrical stimulation (FES) of their leg muscles. As the organizers of CYBATHLON describe, “FES is a technique that allows paralysed muscles to move again. By placing electrodes on the skin or implanting them, currents are applied to the muscles, making them contract. Thus, a person whose nerves from the brain to the leg muscles are disconnected due to a spinal cord injury (SCI) can use an intelligent control device to initiate a movement, e.g. stepping on a bike pedal. New types of electrodes and an exact control of the currents make it possible to maximise the pedal force with each rotation while avoiding early muscle fatigue.” Pilots had 8 minutes to complete 1200m on their static recumbent bike.

Functional electrical stimulation bike race illustration

Five out of the nine teams finished the 1200m race. Therefore, the podium was decided based on finishing time, with pilot Sander Koomen from the winning team PULSE Racing (The Netherlands) completing the distance in 2 minutes and 40 seconds (that’s an average speed of 27km/h). The silver medal went to team ImperialBerkel (UK & The Netherlands) with pilot Johnny Beer, who made a time of 2 minutes and 59 seconds. Finally, team Cleveland (US) with pilot Mark Steven Muhn won the bronze medal with a finishing time of 3 minutes and 13 seconds. You can watch a summary of the top 4 races in the video below.

You can also see the results from the rest of the teams in this discipline here, or watch the recorded livestreams of both days on their website.

Interview to PULSE Racing

Team PULSE Racing

D. C. Z.: What does it mean for your team to have won in your CYBATHLON category?

P.R.: We saw this as a good reflection of where we stand as a team. The result was unexpected, because sometimes it is hard to see results during training. By winning the Cybathlon, our uncertainties about our developments vanished. The golden medal emphasizes our strength and motivation as a student team. Our dream, winning the Cybathlon on the first attempt, came true. We are thankful that the Cybathlon gave us the opportunity to participate, which helped us to gain publicity.

D. C. Z.: And what does it mean for people with disabilities?

P.R.: It means that with joining our team, people with a disability are able to keep developing their bodies and mind, according to a training scheme. This improves mental well-being and health. Besides that they can still be part of the society, and become more confident.

D. C. Z.: What are still your challenges?

P.R.: In the coming years we want to focus more on the mechanics of the bike, to see if we can make some improvements. And it would be great if this form of exercise is accessible for more people with a spinal cord injury. For that it is important that more people are aware of the possibilities of Functional Electrostimulation (FES).

You can follow team updates on Instragram (#pulse.racingnl) and Facebook/LinkedIN (#pulseracing).

Winning team: HSR Enhanced with pilot Florian Hauser

In continuation to this series of CYBATHLON 2020 winners, today we feature the victory of the HSR Enhanced team from the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (OST). In addition, we interviewed their team leader of this year, Christian Bermes.

In this race, pilots with a severe walking disability from seven teams competed against each other in a motorized wheelchair. As the organizers of CYBATHLON describe, “motorized wheelchairs can make everyday life much easier for people with a walking disability. The important thing is that they can overcome obstacles such as ramps and yet are not too large to drive under a normal table. Motorized wheelchairs that are controlled by joystick, tongue control, touchpad or other technologies are eligible for this race and are characterized by innovative approaches to overcome obstacles such as stairs”. The challenge for the pilots was to complete the following tasks:

(1) Driving up to a table until half of the thighs were covered without displacing the table to test the size and seat height of the wheelchair.

(2) Driving through furniture without displacing it to test the size of the wheelchair and precise maneuverability.

(3) Crossing uneven terrain to test the grip of the wheels, ground clearance and power.

(4) Ascending and descending stairs, and bringing the wheelchair to a standstill while descending to test the ability to climb and descend stairs in a controlled manner, and power.

(5) Driving across tilted path with different surfaces to test the drifting and tipping stability, and power.

(6) Driving a ramp up and down, opening and closing the door in the middle using an externally powered technical support (e.g. a robotic arm) to test precise maneuverability and control of technical support in a confined space.

Powered wheelchair race tasks

This year, team HSR Enhanced with pilot Florian Hauser was unbeatable again, as it happened in the 2016 edition. The silver medal went to team Caterwil from Russia with pilot Iurii Larin. The third finalist was team Fortississimo from Japan with pilot Hiroshi Nojima. Here’s a summary of the races of the top 4 finalists:

You can see the results from the rest of the teams in this discipline here, or watch the recorded livestreams of both days on their website.

Interview to Christian Bermes – (ex) Team leader of HSR Enhanced team

We had the pleasure to interview Christian Bermes, team leader of the HSR Enhanced team in both 2016 and 2020 editions. After CYBATHLON 2020, he handed over the team leads, as he moved from OST to be Professor for Mobile Robotics at the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons.

Christian Bermes – (ex) Team leader of HSR Enhanced team

D. C. Z.: What does it mean for your team to have won in your CYBATHLON category?

C.B.: It is a huge confirmation that our first win in 2016 was not just a coïncidence, but again the result of human-centered innovation together with our pilot Florian Hauser, meticulous engineering, proper prior planning, hard training and of course a next-level pilot performance. Needless to say that there was a certain amount of luck involved, too – and hard work puts you where luck finds you.

D. C. Z.: And what does it mean for people with disabilities?

C.B.: I find it hard to answer this in general terms. Our wheelchair as it is right now will not enter a mass market, however some of its modules could, if we found partners for industrialization. I just think it’s great that people with disabilities are the figureheads and heroes of CYBATHLON. They have prepared themselves in the most professional way, have unmatched control over their machines and are simply impressive.

D. C. Z.: What are still your challenges?

C.B.: Right now we enjoy the weightlessness of the win. Soon after, CYBATHLON will publish the new race obstaces for 2024 and I am 100% sure that there will be many technical challenges right away. Moreover, budget has to be secured, sponsors must be found, the team must be sworn in, plus many things more. The goal for 2024 is clear – win another title. I have full confidence in the new lead crew and their team, they will outperform everything we have seen from HSR enhanced until this day. And with Florian Hauser as pilot, we will see lightning speed on the race day.

The story of pilot Florian Hauser

The organizers released a series of videos telling the personal story of some of the competing pilots. The pilot of the HSR Enhanced team, Florian Hauser, “is a tetraplegic since he had a motorcycle accident in 2014. However, this does not prevent him from riding fast. Not on a bike anymore, but in his wheelchair,” as the organizers describe. Apart from being the winner of his discipline in this 2020 edition, Florian also won CYBATHLON 2016 and the CYBATHLON wheelchair Series in Japan.

Winning team: Angel Robotics with pilot Byeong-Uk Kim

The last edition of CYBATHLON took place on 13-14 November, 2020. This competition, created by ETH Zurich and run as a non-profit project, aims to advance in the research and development of assistive technology by involving developers, people with disabilities, and the general public. We had the chance to interview the winning team of the powered exoskeleton race, Angel Robotics from South Korea.

In this race, pilots with complete thoracic or lumbar spinal cord injury from nine teams competed using an exoskeleton. This wearable, powered support enables them to walk and master other everyday tasks. Indeed, the motivation behind this race is that “the use of exoskeletons is still rare, they are currently mainly used for physiotherapy in hospitals and rehabilitation centers. Exoskeletons dramatically increase the mobility of people with paraplegia, which consequently improves their overall physical and psychological health and therefore might represent a welcome addition to a wheelchair”, as the organizers of CYBATHLON state. This race involved:

(1) Sitting down & standing up from a sofa, and stacking cups while standing next to a table to test the range of motion and strength in the knee and hip joints, and stability.

(2) Slaloming around furniture without displacing it to test precision of steps and agility.

(3) Crossing uneven terrain to test precision of steps and adaptation of step lengths and widths.

(4) Climbing and descending stairs to test range of motion and strength in the knee and hip joints, and step precision.

(5) Walking across a tilted path to test the lateral range of motion in hip and foot joints, and stability.

(6) Climbing a ramp, opening and closing the door in the middle of the ramp, and descending the ramp to test the range of motion in foot, knee and hip joints, stability and maneuvering in confined spaces.

Powered exoskeleton race tasks. Credit: CYBATHLON

The top three teams were the company Angel Robotics (1) from South Korea with pilot Byeong-Uk Kim, TWIICE from EPFL research group REHAssist with pilot Silke Pan, and Angel Robotics (2) with pilot Lee Joo-Hyun. Remarkably, the three of them achieved the highest score – 100 points. With this impressive result, the podium was decided based on finishing time. If you can’t wait to watch how tight the races were, you can enjoy them in the summary video below.

You can see the results from the rest of the teams in this discipline here, or watch the recorded livestreams of both days on their website.

Interview to Kyoungchul Kong – Team leader of Angel Robotics team

We had the pleasure to interview Kyungchul Kong, team leader and CEO of Angel Robotics (1&2). He is also an Associate Professor of KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology).

Kyoungchul Kong – Team leader of Angel Robotics team

D. C. Z.: What does it mean for your team to have won in your CYBATHLON category?

K.K.: In WalkON Suit, the powered exoskeleton of Angel Robotics, there have been various dramatic technical advances. Since the first Cybathlon in 2016, the walking speed has become as fast as people without disabilities. The most important feature of WalkON Suit is its balance; as the center of mass is placed on the area of feet while standing straight, the wearer can stand without much effort for a long time. These superior functionalities of WalkON Suit could be proved by winning the Gold and Bronze medals at Cybathlon 2020.

D. C. Z.: And what does it mean for people with disabilities?

K.K.: While winning the Gold medal is glorious, winning two medals is especially meaningful. The physical conditions of the two pilots (i.e., the Gold medalist and the Bronze medalist) of Team Angel Robotics were extremely different. One was a male with very strong upper body, while the other was a female with much less muscles. Such different people could be successfully assisted by WalkON Suit, which means that the powered exoskeleton is not a technology optimized for a single user, but able to be utilized by many people with different body conditions.

D. C. Z.: What are still your challenges?

K.K.: In order to bring the WalkON Suit into the real life of people who need this technology, it has to be much improved in terms of wearability, price, and weight. The user should be able to wear the robot without anyone else’s help. It should be light enough to handle while sitting on a wheelchair. The price is another critical issue considering practical conditions. With these restrictions, the functionalities and performance of the robot must not be deteriorated. These are the challenges we are much trying to get over.

SoftHand Pro. Credits: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

IIT’s teams will compete in the “Powered Arm Prosthesis” category showing two different robotic arm prostheses made in Italy: SoftHandPro and Hannes. The race course is about 30 metres long and will see the pilots compete in three races on 6 stations reproducing daily tasks. 60 teams from 23 countries will be involved in the event “remotely”, streamed on Cybathlon website starting from November 13th.

Maria Fossati interview. Credits: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

The IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) will participate in the Cybathlon Global Edition 2020, an international event organised by the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, and dedicated to new prosthetic devices. People with physical disabilities from all over the world will compete, as pilots, in different disciplines that reproduce daily useful tasks, using the latest discoveries in technology such as robotic prostheses, exoskeletons and new generation wheelchairs. IIT will participate by presenting two robotic arm prostheses: the SoftHand Pro, stemming from a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC), and the Hannes robotic hand developed together with the Italian Centro Protesi INAIL (the prosthetic unit of the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work).

Cybathlon 2020 should have taken place in May at the Letzigrund Stadium in Zurich. However, this year for the first time, due to the current global health crisis, it will take place remotely in 23 countries around the world, from Genoa to Hong Kong, Cleveland to Paris and Melbourne to Tokyo. These countries will transmit their own races to the control center in Zurich where a single programming video will be created and streamed online on 13 November. The competition will be available on Cybathlon website.

The event aims to raise awareness among the general public on the needs of people living with a disability, and to showcase the state-of-the-art of technologies developed in this area also promoting collaboration between research centers.

Preparing for Cybathlon 2020 Credits: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

IIT will vie with two made-in-Italy robotics solutions in the “Powered Arm Prosthesis” category, lining up two different teams: Rehab Tech and SoftHand Pro. The two teams belongs to different IIT research groups, both engaged in research on the movements of the human hand and robotics. They will face competition along the same race track prepared at the IIT’s Center for Human Technologies (CHT-IIT) based in Genova (Italy).

The two teams will use two independent devices that have a common history: they were created in IIT starting from the Pisa/IIT SoftHand robotic hand technology, initially developed for humanoid robots and supported by European Research Council (ERC)’s grant.

Rehab Tech team
This team will use the biomimetic prosthetic hand Hannes, developed in the joint laboratory IIT-INAIL Rehab Technologies Lab, a Class 1 CE product which this year was awarded the Compasso d’Oro Award for design, with the goal of reaching the market in the short-term. The pilot is Colian Rossi, a technical designer who had a work accident in 2015, causing him an arm amputation. He is now an INAIL patient.

Colian Rossi from the Rehab Tech team during training

SoftHand Pro team
They will use the SoftHand Pro realized in the IIT’s Soft Robotics for Human Cooperation and Rehabilitation laboratory in collaboration with the University of Pisa. SoftHand Pro ensues from the ERC SoftHand project and it is now at the center of an ERC’s Synergy Grant (Natural Bionics) which, in future, aims to directly integrate the prosthesis with the subjects’ spinal circuits via neurosurgery. The pilot is Maria Fossati, industrial designer and IIT researcher, who constantly wears the prosthesis.

Maria Fossati from the SoftHand Pro team during training

Each team consists of a pilot and her/his entourage made up of researchers having the role of coaches, athletic trainers and real race mechanics, just as in motor racing competitions.

The race course for the “Powered Arm Prosthesis” category is about 30 metres long and will see the pilots compete in three races on six stations: preparing the table for breakfast, laundry, re-setting a table, using domestic tools (hammer, scissors, etc.), recognising shapes blindly and arranging glasses in the shape of a pyramid. The race will have a maximum duration of 8 minutes. The score is assigned on the basis of the number of completed tasks and the completion time.

Competing teams in this category are 14, from Italy, Sweden, India, South Africa, Russia, Croatia, Great Britain, China, Germany and Switzerland. Teams achieving the 4 best times in their discipline will receive an award on Saturday, 14 November.

Cybathlon 2020 will have a total of 60 teams divided into 6 race disciplines, identified by the pilot’s disability and technology in use. Besides the Power Arm Prosthesis category there is: The Powered Leg Prosthesis, the Powered Exoskeleton, the Powered Wheel Chair, the Brain Computer Interface and the Functional Electrical Stimulation Bike. The event will kick off at 3pm UTC. You can read more information about it in this post and on their website.

Over 50 teams from all over the world will compete against each other in the Cybathlon 2020 Global Edition. (Credit: Alessandro Della Bella / ETH Zürich)

This 13th and 14th of November, the CYBATHLON 2020 edition is taking place. The event will be live-streamed, and it is completely open to the public. You can access it through their website. Here’s the full programme for the two days:

Friday, 13 November 2020

4pm CET (3pm UTC): Brain-Computer Interface Race

The power of thoughts

• Welcome to CYBATHLON 2020 Global Edition!
• Kick-off by the head of competition, Lukas Jaeger
• Races of all teams
• Team stories and insights
• Analysis by the BCI expert Nicole Wenderoth of ETH Zurich
• Special guest: Joël Mesot, President of ETH Zurich
• The top 4: Who will win?

5pm CET (4pm UTC): Powered Arm Prosthesis Race

Grasping and feeling

• Races of all teams
• Team stories and insights
• Guest: Roger Gassert, researcher on assistive technologies at ETH Zurich
• Analysis by the arm prosthesis expert Michel Fornasier
• The top 4: Who will win?

6pm CET (5pm UTC): Functional Electrical Stimulation Bike Race

Power to the muscles

• Races of all teams
• Team stories and insights
• Guest: Robert Riener, initiator of CYBATHLON
• Analysis by Claudio Perret, expert in functional electrical stimulation
• The top 4: Who will win?

7pm CET (6pm UTC): Inside CYBATHLON – Stories, recap and outlook

Insights of the protagonists and organisers – the journey of CYBATHLON

• Robert Riener, initiator of CYBATHLON
• Roger Gassert, researcher on assistive technologies at ETH Zurich
• Florian Hauser, powered wheelchair pilot of team HSR enhanced
• Roland Sigrist, director of CYBATHLON

The medical checks

• Who can compete? Insights of the medical examiners Zina-Mary Manjaly and Jirí Dvořák

Focus: Inclusion

Recap and outlook

Saturday, 14 November 2020

1pm CET (12pm UTC): Powered Wheelchair Race

Overcoming stairs and ramps

• Races of all teams
• Insights of the head of competition, Lukas Jaeger
• Team stories and insights
• Guest: Roger Gassert, researcher on assistive technologies at ETH Zurich
• Analysis by scientist Sue Bertschy
• The top 4: Who will win?

2pm CET (1pm UTC): Powered Leg Prosthesis Race

Watch your step

• Races of all teams
• Team stories and insights
• Guest: Robert Riener, initiator of CYBATHLON
• Analysis by expert Lukas Christen, parathlete and coach
• The top 4: Who will win?

3pm CET (2pm UTC): Powered Exoskeleton Race

Walking in robotic suits

• Races of all teams
• Guest: Roger Gassert, researcher on assistive technologies at ETH Zurich
• Analysis by the exoskeleton developers Jaime Duarte and Kai Schmidt
• The top 4: Who will win?

4pm CET (3pm UTC): Inside CYBATHLON – Stories, recap and outlook

Insights of the protagonists and organisers – the future of CYBATHLON and social inclusion

• Silke Pan, Powered Exoskeleton Pilot of team TWIICE
• Robert Riener, Initiator of CYBATHLON

New systems

• Maria Fossati, powered arm prosthesis pilot of team SoftHand Pro
• Max Erick Busse-Grawitz, expert on mechatronics
• Roger Gassert, researcher on assistive technologies at ETH Zurich

Recap and outlook – the CYBATHLON @school and the next CYBATHLON

• Special guest: Sarah Springman, rector of ETH Zurich
• Robert Riener, initiator of CYBATHLON
• Roland Sigrist, director of CYBATHLON

The next CYBATHLON

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Shuo Yang about DJI’s RoboMaster first-person shooter (FPS) competition, a competition designed to get people excited about robotics. For the competition, university teams build and program a robot to go against DJI’s robots in a shooting battle. Each robot has a way of propelling marble-sized plastic balls and pressure sensors on their sides to register if they’ve been hit by an opponent’s projectile. Shuo speaks about the goals of the competition, the teams that are involved, what strategies the teams use, the difficulties the team had in making their robot’s good competitors, the future of the challenge, and how people can get involved.

Note that RoboMaster’s final tournament for the FPS competition starts on July 20, 2018 and goes until July 28, 2018.

Shuo Yang

Shuo Yang is the Director of Intelligent Navigation Technologies at DJI. He obtained B.Eng and M.Phil degrees from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He is involved in developing flight control and navigation technologies for several DJI flagship products, such as the Inspire 1, Phantom 4 and Matrice 100 drones and the A3 flight controller. He has coauthored 4 academic papers and obtained near 10 US patents. Shuo is also leading an educational robotics competition project called RoboMaster at DJI.

Links

• Robomaster’s Official Website
• Robomaster’s Livestream Platform
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In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Marco Hutter, Assistant Professor for Robotic Systems at ETH Zürich, about a quadrupedal robot designed for autonomous operation in challenging environments, called ANYmal. Hutter discusses ANYmal’s design, the ARGOS oil and gas rig inspection challenge, and the advantages and complexities of quadrupedal locomotion. 

Here is a video showing some of the highlights of ANYmal at the ARGOS Challenge.

Here is a video that shows some of the motions ANYmal is capable of.

Marco Hutter

Marco Hutter is assistant professor for Robotic Systems at ETH Zürich since 2015 and Branco Weiss Fellow since 2014. Before this, he was deputy director and group leader in the field of legged robotics at the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zürich. After studying mechanical engineering, he conducted his doctoral degree in robotics at ETH with focus on design, actuation, and control of dynamic legged robotic systems. Beside his commitment within the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication since October 2015 Hutter is part of the NCCR robotics and coordinator of several research projects, industrial collaborations, and international competitions (e.g. ARGOS challenge) that target the application of high-mobile autonomous vehicles in challenging environments such as for search and rescue, industrial inspection, or construction operation. His research interests lie in the development of novel machines and actuation concepts together with the underlying control, planning, and optimization algorithms for locomotion and manipulation.

Links

• Download mp3 (11.1 MB)
• Robotic Systems Lab
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

In addition to the Competition Awards, Marta Palau Franco from Bristol Robotics Laboratory and ERL Emergency project manager introduced the referees’ special awards.

“Behind a multi-domain competition there is always a large technical committee, I feel privileged to have worked with such an amazing team of volunteer referees, technical assistants and safety pilots and divers. We were delighted to give these awards to recognise teams’ effort, fair play and hard work. The experience of participating in this robotics competition will prove beneficial for team members to develop further their professional career”, said Marta Palau Franco.

Mapping Award, handed by Vladimir Djapic from AFAK, for good quality georeferenced undersea mapping.
Winner: AUV Team Tomkyle, Germany (sea)

Navigation Award, handed by Pino Casalino from the University of Genova, for the effort to change and adapt algorithms to navigate without a Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) sensor, important for the AUV (autonomous Undersea Vehicle) navigation.
Winner: Oubot Team, Hungary (sea)

Fair Play Award, handed by Marta Palau Franco from the University of the West of England, Bristol, for lending to the Tuscany Robotics Team a wheel platform for their new robot and for lending the batteries of their aerial robot to ISEP/INESC TEC aerial team.
Winners: ENSTA Team and ENSTA Bretagne, France (land, air, sea)

Creativity Award, handed by Bernd Bruggermann from Fraunhofer FKIE, for building a land robot from scratch in less than two days when their ground platform broke.
Winner: Tuscany Robotics, Italy (land, air, sea)

Multi-domain Cooperation Award, handed by Fausto Ferreira from CMRE, for cooperation between domains. The teams used a graphical interface in which each robot from sea and air domain reported its findings in the competition arena in real-time.
Winner: Universitat de Girona, Spain (sea) + ISEP/INESC TEC, Portugal (air)

Perseverance Award, handed by Francisco Javier Perez Grau from FADA-CATEC, for hard work on the development and integration of the aerial robot. The team competed in the Grand Challenge the day after their aerial platform suffered a severe crash, working overnight to fix it.
Winner: HSR Search and Rescue Team, Switzerland (air)

Piloting Award, handed by Stjepan Bogdan from University of Zagreb-FER , for outstanding UAV piloting skills. The team was able to recover the aerial robot after an unintentional landing without incurring manual intervention.
Winner: Raptors, Poland (land & air)

Autonomy Award, handed by Frank Schneider from Fraunhofer FKIE, for the best autonomy of land robots. Outstanding autonomous navigation and automatic object detection.
Winner: IMM, Poland (land)

SAUC-E Student Award – handed by Bill Kirkwood (IEEE OES), Kelly Cooper (ONR) and Hitesh Patel (AUVSI) to the best student marine team.
Winner: AUV Team Tomkyle, Germany (sea)

Teams were given a diploma and set of eZ430-Chronos development tool sponsored by Texas Instruments.

Watch the ERL Emergency 2017 Awards Ceremony video

More info

The European Robotics League is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement n° 688441.

The ERL Emergency Robots 2017 competition was organised locally by the NATO STO-Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) of La Spezia, Italy.

RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal to advance the state of the art of intelligent robots. Established in 1997, the original mission was to field a team of robots capable of winning against the human soccer World Cup champions by 2050.

To celebrate 20 years of RoboCup, the Federation is launching a video series featuring each of the leagues with one short video for those who just want a taster, and one long video for the full story. Robohub will be featuring one league every week leading up to RoboCup 2017 in Nagoya, Japan.

In our final set of videos, we are featuring the RoboCupJunior league! RoboCupJunior is a project-oriented educational initiative that sponsors local, regional and international robotic events for young students. It is designed to introduce RoboCup to primary and secondary school children, as well as undergraduates who do not have the resources to get involved in the senior leagues yet.

Short version:

Long version:

You can view all the videos on the RoboCup playlist below:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEfaZULTeP_-bqFvCLBWnOvFAgkHTWbWC

Please spread the word! If you would like to join a team, click here for more information.

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

• RoboCup video series: 20 years of history
• RoboCup video series: Industrial league
• RoboCup video series: Soccer league
• RoboCup video series: Rescue league
• RoboCup video series: @Home league
• What has twenty years of RoboCup taught us?
• How we evolved a winning strategy for the RoboCup competition by imitating nature

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

RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal to advance the state of the art of intelligent robots. Established in 1997, the original mission was to field a team of robots capable of winning against the human soccer World Cup champions by 2050.

To celebrate 20 years of RoboCup, the Federation is launching a video series featuring each of the leagues with one short video for those who just want a taster, and one long video for the full story. Robohub will be featuring one league every week leading up to RoboCup 2017 in Nagoya, Japan.

This week, we consider being part of the RoboCupIndustrial league. RoboCupIndustrial is a competition between industrial mobile robots focusing on logistics and warehousing systems. In anticipation of Industry 4.0, participants compete in automation through robots, autonomous systems, and mobile robot technology. You’ll hear about the history and ambitions of RoboCup from the trustees, and inspiring teams from around the world.

Short version:

Long version:

Want to watch the rest? You can view all the videos on the RoboCup playlist below:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEfaZULTeP_-bqFvCLBWnOvFAgkHTWbWC

Please spread the word! If you would like to join a team, click here for more information.

• RoboCup video series: 20 years of history
• RoboCup video series: Soccer league
• RoboCup video series: Rescue league
• RoboCup video series: @Home league
• What has twenty years of RoboCup taught us?
• How we evolved a winning strategy for the RoboCup competition by imitating nature

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

3! 2! 1! Go! Suddenly, robots jerk into motion and zoom across the field to score points, crossing over several types of terrain and shooting balls into high and low goals. Another buzzer sounds, drivers pick up their controls and all six robots—three per alliance—are now under human control. As these huge 120-pound robots score points, cheers ring through a packed stadium, fueled by high school students who worked hard to build their robot in just six weeks. As the match ends, nervous and excited students wait to see who is the winner of the 2016 world championship.

This was my last match as a member of the Girls of Steel FIRST Robotics Competition Team #3504. FIRST (For Recognition and Inspiration of Science and Technology) is a robotics program for students from K-12, and I was in the last division, FRC. The program is about more than introducing students to STEM and giving them hands-on experience, it’s about helping students to grow and have positive impacts by recognizing community service efforts, celebrating good values, developing soft skills, and guiding students to pursue higher education.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtE6Va6oOhU

The next fall, I was off to college at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, studying to become a mechanical engineer. For the first time in my life, I was on my own. My time was so swept away by schoolwork, clubs, exploring the city, and making new friends that FIRST became a distant memory. Now, I fear that if I hadn’t bumped back into it, I would have lost touch with the program that played such a critical role in my life. While at a robotics club meeting, sign ups for the FRC Midwest Regional Planning Committee were passed around. Wanting to somehow get involved, I signed up.

I had no idea what to expect as I walked into a big conference room with a friend, and fellow FRC alum, for our first committee meeting. As the meeting progressed—densely filled with information and detailed plans for upcoming seasons and younger leagues—I sat there stunned. Regardless of if they were an alum or not, there were so many people who dedicated their time and effort to make this program work for students. It was a wake-up call. During my four years of being a member, I took so much for granted and didn’t realize the magnitude of hard work that volunteers and mentors put in for the students. They were the ones who supported and helped make me the person that I am today. So, to all of the volunteers and mentors who may be reading this, thank you for everything, I couldn’t have done it without you.

Just like that, I was hooked on FIRST once again. I kept going to meetings, trying to help as much as I could while making connections with other volunteers. Right before the season started, there were a couple teams who had a shortage of mentors, which is how I found Hawks on the Horizon FRC team #5125. The first meeting I went to with the students opened my eyes; I was so used to being a member, I had no idea how to mentor FRC. Eventually, I learned how to be a different figure in a familiar situation and how to adjust to the differences between a large all-girls team, with many resources, and a small family-like team. Yet, without a doubt, I knew this was my new team. From the very first day, I was welcomed with open arms by the mentors and students, who made sure I came back.

“Who is your role model?” was a common question for me when I was very young, and I’d respond with a superhero. Now it’s never asked, but I have a better answer since I’ve gotten the chance to meet some of them. One of my role models is a student mentor from my old team. Although I haven’t seen her in a long time, I found myself remembering conversations we’d had years ago about some of the challenges of being a student mentor. Knowing I wasn’t alone, and how she’d dealt with some sticky situations, helped me guide students to find their own answers and become comfortable being hands-off myself. I’ve learned so much from past mentors like her, fellow mentors, and the students themselves. I’m happy to have found my FIRST family again.

The Midwest Regional was a whole new experience for me. During high school, my competition days were hectic, filled with fixing the robot, talking to other teams, and cheering for our alliance. At this past regional, it was an entirely different world. I was the student volunteer coordinator, helping run the student ambassador program and talking to people about how to get involved. I only visited my team when I got the chance. I was less aware of specific robots and paid more attention to what happens behind the scenes to ensure regional runs like a well-oiled machine. I want to be more involved in the process, since these competitions ignited a passion for engineering within me, and I cannot express with words how grateful I am.

Regardless of the changes within the past year, by the end of the competition, I still rocked the uniform. I’m incredibly proud of Hawks on the Horizon, thankful for Girls of Steel, and amazed by everyone in the Midwest Planning Committee. This transition from being a member to mentor has been an amazing journey and it doesn’t stop here. I’ll be working to give back for the rest of my life by helping make programs like FIRST happen for future students. Thank you to everyone who is a part of this organization and to find a team or event, go to firstinspires.org.

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

• FIRST 2013 photo essay: Girls of Steel in the trenches at the FRC championship finals
• FIRST 2014 photo essay: Girls of Steel back in St. Louis
• ‘It’s a reminder we are making a difference in the world’: Girls of Steel follow-up
• Getting into the driver’s seat: Girls of Steel tell us how they got hooked on robotics
• The story of Atlas, FRC Team #3504 Girls of Steel
• A vision for Nigeria’s youth: FIRST LEGO league competition held in Nigeria

RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal to advance the state of the art of intelligent robots. Established in 1997, the original mission was to field a team of robots capable of winning against the human soccer World Cup champions by 2050.

To celebrate 20 years of RoboCup, the Federation is launching a video series featuring each of the leagues with one short video for those who just want a taster, and one long video for the full story. Robohub will be featuring one league every week leading up to RoboCup 2017 in Nagoya, Japan.

This week, we consider being part of the RoboCup@Home league. Robots helping at home can certainly ‘feel’ like the future. One day, these robots might help with various tasks around the house. You’ll hear about the history and ambitions of RoboCup from the trustees, and inspiring teams from around the world.

Short version:

Long version:

Want to watch the rest? You can view all the videos on the RoboCup playlist below:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEfaZULTeP_-bqFvCLBWnOvFAgkHTWbWC

Please spread the word! and if you would like to join a team, check here for more information.

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

• RoboCup video series: 20 years of history
• RoboCup video series: Soccer league
• RoboCup video series: Rescue league
• What has twenty years of RoboCup taught us?
• How we evolved a winning strategy for the RoboCup competition by imitating nature

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

A record number of teams submitted beautiful robot-created artwork for the second year of this 5-year worldwide competition. In total, there were 38 teams from 10 countries who submitted 200 different artworks!

Winners were determined based on a combination of public voting (over 3000 people with a Facebook account), judges consisting of working artists, critics, and technologists, and by how well the team met the spirit of the competition—that is, to create something beautiful using a physical brush and robotics, and to share what they learned with others.  Learn more about the goals of the contest and its rules here.

Teams are encouraged to hang on to their artwork as there will be a physical exhibition of robotic-created artwork following next year’s competition (Summer 2018).  This exhibition, most likely in Seattle, WA, will showcase winners of the 2017 and 2018 competition.  The goal is to test Andy Warhol’s theory that  “You know it’s ART, when the check clears.”

… and now, for the team winners of the 2017 Robot Art Competition:

1st Place—$40,000—PIX18 / Creative Machines Lab—Columbia University (USA)

House, by PIX18 & Creative Machines Lab

This project from Columbia shows a high level of skill with brushstrokes. This, along with some deep learning algorithms, produces some lovely paintings from sources or scratch. When they used a photograph as the source they were able to create plenty of variation from the original and using a fluid medium to produce an atmospheric and open-ended visual experience.  Much of their work had a painterly and contemporary presentation.

2nd Place—$25,000—CMIT ReART, Kasetsart University (Thailand)

King Bhumibol Adulyadej, by CMIT ReArt

Artists program this robot brushstroke by stroke, using a haptic recording system that generates volumes of data about the position of the brush and the forces being exerted. When re-played, reART will generate a perfect reproduction of the original strokes. Haptic recording and playback allows for remarkably high-quality inkbrush drawings

One of the aspects of a success commercial artist is to know their market.  In this case, the students chose to paint the popular and recently deceased Thai King and therefore were able to get many students to vote for their team.

3rd Place—$10,000—CloudPainter—Gonzaga (USA)

Hunter 2017 (Deep Learning Abstract Portraiture), by CloudPainter

All of this teams offerings are important. They are aiming at an interpretation of the optical properties of oil paint and applying them to deep learning. Spontaneous paint, “mosaicing” of adjacent tones, layering effects and the graphical interplay between paint strokes of varying textures, are all hand/eye, deeply neurally sophisticated aspects of oil painting that this team is trying to evince together with a robot.

This team also won the $5,000 prize for technical contribution.

4th Place $6000—e-David—University of Konstanz (Germany)

Homage to Jackson Pollock, by e-David

Using software that enables a collaboration between a human artist and roboticist, e-David mimics closely the approach a human painter would work on the canvas. An accompanying academic paper goes into deep detail about their approach to the project.

5th Place $4000—JACKbDU—New York University Shanghai (China)

WWF, by JACKbDU

Clean lines, interesting abstractions, both familiar and abstract subjects made me appreciate the overall body.  In particularly, purely from aesthetics, these were found to be most compelling.

6th Place $2000—HEARTalion—Halmstad University (Sweden)

MISERABLE, by HEARTalion

If this body of work was exhibited at a gallery and I was told that the artist aimed to capture emotion through color, composition, and textures—I would buy (says one of our professional judges). The bold brush strokes, cool or warm templates to match the emotional quality expressed, all made sense—but felt alive. Loved them.

7th Place $2000—Late Night Projects—Independent

Koi: Layered Painting, by Late Night Projects

Loved the composition of both of these pieces.  Both pieces bring an emotive calm with just a few colors, technique, and simplicity.  Gem-style optical sketch, intimate scale, good formal balance, medium application and value panels.

8th Place $2000—Wentworth Institute of Technology (USA)

Profile 03, by Wentworth Institute of Technology

This project uses the precision of a robot to take crude brush dabs to astonishing levels. By incorporating 3d scans into its image generation, this bot operates with a complete understanding of its subject; much like a human painter would have someone sitting for them. The team was kind enough to publish their 3d models and source code, so others can learn from and build off of their work.

9th Place $2000—CARP—Worcester Polytechnic Institute (USA)

Geometry No1, by CARP

Very good line. Lots of space in this drawing and central form is simultaneously dense and traversable.  Good architectural reference in clear tooling, but enlivened by sumo type or Franz Kline strokes. If the shapes can continue to be explored while maintaining the hand/machine balance, this will remain a strong venue.

Slightly synesthetic. Beautiful and balanced fusion of technical and handmade, crystalline and organic.

10th Place $2000—BABOT—Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)

People in Space, by BABOT

MIT’s BABOT was able to produce this and other inspiring vistas.

Special recognition prizes $1000/each

Chicago Engineering Design Team – University of Illinois at Chicago (USA)

JacksonBot – University of Heidelberg (Germany)

Christian H. Seidler – The Jeffersonian Institute (USA)

Anguis – Oregon State University (USA)

Manibus Team – Ballet Des Moines (USA)

Stacy Nagata, Peter Malarkey, Jonathan Zornow.

Click here to see more works of RobotArt, and to learn more about the competition.

Robo Done, the robotic academy franchise for kids from Osaka, Japan, celebrated Japan’s Day of the Children on the 5th of May at their annual event, Robot Festival 2017 or RoboFes. The event welcomed over 1,000 attendees, including children and their parents.

This was the 2nd time Robo Done has celebrated the festival. In only one year, the number of attendees has increased threefold (350 attendees in 2016 to over 1,012 in 2017). It was celebrated in the KANDAI MeRise Campus of the Kansai University in Osaka, Japan and has become the biggest event at the campus.

The main activity was the Robot Contest, using LEGO Mindstorm, with morning and afternoon leagues. Over 200 children — from 6 years and up — participated in the championship. The kids built robots in pairs and programmed their creations, repeating the process of trial-and-error against a time limit. Several IT and robot related companies had booths, as well as, students of the university, which offered a variety of activities for the kids to enjoy.

Robo Done will hold RoboFes again in 2018, hoping to inspire even more kids to enjoy robotics and programming. We hope RoboFes will become a regular event during Japan’s “Golden Week!”

We are happy to announce that Qualifier 3 is now open for the Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC)! ARIAC is a simulation-based competition is designed to promote agility in industrial robot systems by utilizing the latest advances in artificial intelligence and robot planning. The goal is to enable industrial robots on the shop floors to be more productive, more autonomous, and to require less time from shop floor workers.

You can learn more about the competition here. The top performing teams will be invited to present at a workshop held during IROS 2017 in Vancouver. So far we have completed Qualifiers 1 and 2, highlights of which you can see here:

and here:

While the first two Qualifiers are now closed, there’s still time to join the competition. You have until May 15, 2017 to submit your results from Qualifier 3 and secure a spot in the final competition, to be held in early June. To learn how to participate, visit the ARIAC site.

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Roland Siegwart and Matthias Hüni about Kickstart Accelerator, a Swiss Startup Accelerator. Siegwart leads the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zürich and is one of the initiators of Kickstart Accelerator. Hüni is the vertical lead of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at Kickstart Accelerator and is involved in the program’s operations. Kickstart Accelerator seeks to provide international entrepreneurs with an inlet to the Swiss ecosystem, including connections to industry and academia.

Roland Siegwart

Roland Siegwart is a Professor of Autonomous Systems at ETH Zurich since July 2006 and Founding Co-Director of the Wyss Zurich. From January 2010 to December 2014 he took office as Vice President Research and Corporate Relations in the Executive Board. Roland Siegwart’s research interests are in the design and control of systems operating in complex and highly dynamical environments. His major goal is to find new ways to deal with uncertainties and enable the design of highly interactive and adaptive systems. Prominent application examples are personal and service robots, autonomous micro-aircrafts, walking and swimming robots and driver assistant systems.

Matthias Hüni

Matthias is a software engineer by profession and a maker by passion. At Impact Hub Zurich, he works for Kickstart Accelerator, taking care of the Robotics and Intelligent Systems vertical. Before Kickstart, he helped setting up the makerZspace at Impact Hub Colab, leveraging his experience from FabLab Zurich – both digital (and analog) fabrication workshops for startups and individuals to rapidly prototype and materialize their ideas and projects. His professional background covers several years in software architecture and IT project management at fundinfo.com before he started his own company sporttrip.ch, a online marketing and consulting services provider for the travel industry and beyond.

Links

• Kickstart Accelerator’s website
• Download mp3 (13.2 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

Transcript has been edited for clarity.

Audrow:
Hi, welcome to Robots Podcast.

Roland:
Hello.

Matt:
Hello.

Audrow:
Would you introduce yourselves?

Roland:
I’m Roland Siegwart. I’m a professor on robotics at ETH Zurich. Also, I am one of the initiator of the Kickstart Accelerator here in Zurich.

Matt:
My name is Matthias Hüni, I go by Matt. I am the vertical lead for smart and connected machines vertical at Kickstart Accelerator, so I’m the counterpart of Roland in the operations of the program.

Audrow:
Now, would you tell me what Kickstart Accelerator is, Roland?

Roland:
Kickstart Accelerator is, as the name says, an accelerator program for young entrepreneurs.

Roland:
With a special focus on topics, I will come back to this, and also on the goals. So, what do you want to actually to offer the Swiss ecosystem to people mainly from abroad to benefit from having contacts through industry, but also to universities in specific fields.

Roland:
This makes it actually also special that we selected different verticals we call them, on topics where a student has to add something, or has to offer something. For example, new fintech, or smart and connecting machines where

Audrow:
And fintech is financial technology, right?

Roland:
Yes, exactly.

Audrow:
Okay, so analyzing markets and this kind of thing?

Roland:
Yes.

Audrow:
Okay. So you’re working within these verticals and you’re trying to develop accelerator, to help entrepreneurs in these areas, right? Would you tell me a bit about the areas? So fintech you mentioned, robotics is one of them.

Roland:
Yes, we have an additional one which is food, which is everything which is linked with food from production to up to the point where you sell food, where we offer them a vertical. Then we had one, which is was very generic, which was about the future of emerging technologies. We both remained in both this vertical on smart and connected machines, which is everything about machines which are connected through the network and offer new services to humans, toward our society, and of course robotics perfectly falls into this field.

Audrow:
So how are you involved with the Kickstart Accelerator?

Roland:
I myself, as mentioned I was involved in setting up the whole thing. So we came up with this idea that we should have something additionally in Switzerland about two years ago. Then I was involved in the definition on this verticals-

Roland:
And then really Kickstart Accelerator, I was somewhat involved as an expert. I was interacting with the different teachers selected to come to Zurich to give them support, to connect them to companies, but also connect them to lead with structural effects, at ETH to show that really benefit from the environment.

Audrow:
So how is this related to your role as a professor at ETH?

Roland:
So in principle, it probably has not a very direct connection, but of course I was always also very interested in not only doing research, but also bringing this to its market to really make something out of the wonderful research. My people do it here at ETH. We had ourselves a couple of first spinoffs already which are doing pretty well.

Roland:
So I am always excited to see young people really coming up with ideas and bringing them to the market. This is more or less a private initiative, which I think is very valuable for Switzerland and for young people.

Audrow:
Okay. And Matt, would you tell me how you’re involved as a vertical lead?

Matt:
Yeah, sure. I’m more like let’s say the ground troops in the vertical. I took care of onboarding all the startups. I also took care of the selection process where Roland was involved as an expert and lots of other people from our partners involved.

Matt:
My job is to facilitate the selection of the onboarding of the startups, the whole program, the access of the startups to our partners.

Matt:
As well as, generally, everything where the startups are stuck or they need help. Also, it’s a mixture in between event management, but also my background as observe engineer, helps me a lot in kind of understanding their technical issues and startup issues being part of the startup for the last 10 years.

Matt:
I would say it’s really a very generic, but also very specific ground work role that I’m taking care of.

Audrow:
I see. Now can you tell me about some of the companies that you have in the smart and connected machines domain, or vertical?

Matt:
Yeah, sure. I think it’s a very broad application. For example, there is one startup called Rooftop. They are developing sensor technologies to work sensor technologies on a very, let’s say affordable level, where they make robotics in the mass production market more sensible, or sensitive. There is a robotics startup, I would call it a robotics startup, it’s Teal. It’s a robotic building blocks for kids, it’s an Aztec education technology startup. They’re working close with Google Education now. They’re also involved with Roland. We have another startup with the name of Miscopic, they’re in a completely different field. They are doing field service technician support with a software that integrates into this new field of augmented reality. So you have to use Microsoft photo lenses for example, where Miscopic tries to take these devices into the field service technicians work.

Matt:
So they are at the machine and they can use this augmented reality applications. We had a selfie drone startup. Drones, of course, always have to be part of accelerators because everybody knows about drones and everybody wants to have drones. Their goal was to have a drone that you can get rid of your selfie stick, basically.

Matt:
What else did we have? I at least missed two startups.

Audrow:
Yes, I see six.

Roland:
Yes. We had, for example, one which a double ops a unit, which allows to track precisely stuff which is delivered. For example, where they are, but mainly also the temperature they go through, the humidity they go through, so that in logistics you have a precise track of what happened with the goods. This is especially for example, interesting for medicine, where you have to never go above a certain temperature.

Matt:
They were also Marvin, the future emersion technologies, vertical. Then the Remember Mind Books, which is also a very interesting combination of the simple metric attach storage thing where you just need to store data and you want to be sure that your data is safely stored.

Matt:
They are combining it with block chain technology as a, let’s say as a distributed cloud. Private cloud, where you store your data not only on your device, but also on other devices that are within your ear.

Matt:
It’s encrypted and you do the whole storage accounting stuff. So you use storage on all those machines and you pay for it using Bitcoin.

Audrow:
Oh, cool.

Matt:
They pay for their use of your space because they’re distributing their 1,000 new machines as well.

Matt:
So that’s a very interesting combination of this big new thing called block chain.

Audrow:
Yes. Okay. Now how many startups do you have total, between all of the verticals?

Matt:
There are 30 startups.

Audrow:
Yes.

Matt:
10 in the think tank section, six in the smart and connected machine section, or verticals as we call it.

Audrow:
Okay.

Matt:
Also six in the future and emerging technologies, and seven startups in the foods vertical. That doesn’t add up to 30, but 31, but one of the food startups was an entrepreneur team. That’s another possibility of participating in this accelerator, so if you’re part of an entrepreneurial team of one of our partners, you can participate in this program.

Audrow:
Okay. Now can you tell me a bit about the program that you offer entrepreneurs? Roland, if you want to describe this.

Roland:
Yes, first of all we have a wonderful space where we have all this startups together for roughly three months. They are not only accumulate together, but are also hosted in a youth hostel where they live more or less during night there, which is an important element. They interact, they challenge each other, there is some peer pressure.

Roland:
Then there is of course a very precise photo ops. So every week they have to report on their progress. The most important part is, of course, to connect them to potential clients, and to potential technology providers and supporters, so they can really nicely benefit from the Swiss ecosystem. So this was also then reflected in the outcome that we have. Most of these startups, we’ve spent three months in Switzerland, had then also pilot studies with companies around Switzerland, where they can actually test their ideas and visions, and really go and interact with potential clients and markets.

Audrow:
Okay. And what stage are these startups typically when they come to you for this accelerator?

Roland:
The selection criteria for us are at least an MVP, a minimum value product.

Roland:
So if your product isn’t ready yet, I think it’s too early to participate in this program.

Roland:
You also should have a sound team. So if you’re just, let’s say, a couple of friends having a good idea and you kind of clicked together a prototype, but you kind of, let’s say, lack the whole business expertise-

Audrow:
Acumen.

Roland:
You should have a business plan that it doesn’t need to be sound until the next 10 years, but you should know what you’re talking about, what numbers you’re talking about, and what you are hungry for in the end.

Audrow:
So you mean defining a market, in this sense?

Roland:
Yes. Exactly. You need to have a team, you need to have some traction, this is your minimum value product, and you of course need to convince us that you have potential. That this is a thing that’s not only born out of an idea you have, but out of a necessity and out of a problem that you are trying to solve.

Audrow:
Okay. So what does the program look like over the three months? You mentioned that all of the students, or all of the people live together. All of the entrepreneurs live in a hostel together and how there’s a competition there. But then, what does it look like with the mentoring and what do they have access to? Do they have access to good machine shops and perhaps information they wouldn’t have otherwise? What kind of things?

Roland:
It depends a little bit on, generally speaking, the startups are working together also, so they live in the same place during the night, or when they leave in the evening they go to the youth hostel where most of the startups live, except the ones who are from Zurich, of course.

Audrow:
And yes, they go home.

Roland:
Yes. They work in the same place as well. It’s an old transformer building in the middle of the city of Zurich.

Audrow:
Oh, cool.

Roland:
Just been converted into a co-working space. I highly recommend the listeners of this podcast to visit our webpage and have a glimpse at the pictures, it’s really nice.

Audrow:
And it will be included with the blog post for the episode.

Roland:
Very cool. Very cool. There we also try to always mingle the startups with each other, so they have the exchange there in the program. We have the format of master classes, so our partners provide master classes on certain topics, entrepreneurial, funding, technical topics, team project management, you name it, and of course investment. They get pitch training of course, because they will be pitching in front of investors-

Roland:
At midterm demo day and also at the final demo day.

Roland:
We have the format of so called one-on-one sessions with the partners as well, where you as a startup have the chance to meet experts from all our partners to kind of challenge you on your idea.

Roland:
If there is a match, or if there is at least interest, to have the possibility to work closer with this partner, and maybe possibly end up with a pilot/POC, as it’s called proof of concept, where you are in the end maybe implementing your product with one of the partners.

Audrow:
Okay. Oh, go ahead.

Roland:
You mentioned mentoring so I think that’s one thing that really distincts us from other projects or programs. The kickstart mentor you have is an entrepreneurial mentor, is somebody who has an entrepreneurial background. Usually, he has already founded several startups and failed and didn’t fail. Both hopefully.

Audrow:
Yes.

Roland:
He’s kind of your big brother and he takes you by the hand through the program and takes care of your entrepreneurial progress.

Roland:
That’s a very important aspect of this program because I think that most of the accelerators, they have several mentors for startup in different phases, and we make sure that you have one mentor. He takes you through the whole program and also the feedback from the startups was very positive on this side. The feedback from the mentors, of course.

Audrow:
Yes. I would imagine. Now, can you tell me about the seed funding for each startup and then what kind of stakes this Kickstart Accelerator has in each startup after they complete the program?

Roland:
If you are being selected for the program we grant you 10,000 francs, as a kind of start, or as a means of you will have expenses for your company. We also have this so called founder’s stipend, where each of the founders that are participating in the program, that’s up to three people, will get a stipend for the day-to-day expenses. Like, you want to eat something, for sure.

Audrow:
Yes.

Roland:
You want to have some party, hopefully, as well. We are not covering everything, but we can make sure that you kind of have enough money to keep you alive and keep you healthy in Zurich during these three months.

Roland:
In the end of the program, you’re able to winning up to 15,000 francs, so that ends up for your company not as the stipend, but as seed funding for your company in the end up to 25,000 K, if you make the first place at the end of the program.

Audrow:
So how many companies are in a batch over the three month period that compete for this 15,000 franc prize?

Roland:
This is verticalized, so you have-

Audrow:
Okay, per domain? Okay.

Roland:
Exactly. Per vertical, you have these 25. That means in the fintech vertical where you have 10 startups, it will be five startups getting more than these 10,000 francs.

Roland:
In the smart and connected machines, this year it was only six startups, so it was the upper half of the startups usually can get more than the 10,000, but the 10,000 they are granted if you’re being selected for the program.

Audrow:
Okay. Now, you have quite a collaboration here. There are many companies, and supporting partners, can you tell me a bit about who are your partners? I’d like to learn about setting this process up. Roland, would you talk a bit about your partners in this endeavor?

Roland:
Yes. In principle it’s at the moment, mainly big corporates in Switzerland, like the big Swiss banks. Also companies from food sectors, or the two big retailers for food, it’s with Migros and Coop. Then also the universities, ETH, University of Zurich, and Epath File of the Future are involved as more or less a technology provider. There are some industrial companies also. So for the next three years we are really pushing that we have more industrial companies also involved, which are probably more important, especially for smart and connected machines vertical. It’s somewhat of course an important and hard job to convince companies to invest in this to support young people, and then also to show them that it’s profitable for the whole ecosystem to generate new innovation and to [inaudible 00:27:40]. But also a high potential for themselves as probably bringing new ideas and having new technologies, which they can use for that product.

Audrow:
Okay. One of the selling points I saw on the website was that the Kickstart Accelerator can connect entrepreneurs to a European market. You mentioned global before, but probably more specifically the European market that you’re connecting with, and this comes from the partners that you have, correct? How do you connect them to the European market and then global market from there?

Roland:
Yes. I think it’s mainly through the partners. Of course, universities involved are international and a lot of network, but also the companies. There are probably companies which are a little bit more Switzerland-centric, like the retailer Migros and Coop, but the bigger companies are in finance they are very international. Also industrial partners like Maxon we had in which is well known in robotics community as world leading company for small and high performance motors. They actually open up to their network to and give them access to international collections. This is not the primary goal, so I think what we can offer you in the three months is to connect mainly to these companies and to the universities.

Roland:
Then, of course, the next step is that they continue to work with them, exchange with them, and then also have perfect access to different fields internationally.

Matt:
I might jump in here.

Audrow:
Yes, of course.

Matt:
In terms of partners, or to answer your question in terms of market access, if you look at the partner’s page, or it’s on the home page in the lower section, you’ll see all these logos.

Audrow:
Yes.

Matt:
You’ll see all these competitors, basically. So you have UBS and Credit Swiss, you have Migros and Coop, you have PWCX and EY, we call it the co-O petition thing. They work together still yet they are competitors.

Matt:
For example, all the consulting companies they bring you this really European and also worldwide access to other companies as they are consulting big corporations, small corporations all over the world.

Matt:
Also, lets say, ADP, all these partners, in the end they’re rooted in the Europe area, but they’re also rooted in different parts of the world. So this I will say is an outstanding opportunity and it’s really unique to have access to such big and such interesting companies.

Audrow:
Can you tell me a bit about the process of getting all of these companies to support the Kickstart Accelerator or be partners in some way?

Matt:
Yes, so there is one element also behind which had to be mentioned, it’s called Initial Switzerland. This is an association where with a vision around, big corporate actually initiated this, it’s a vision really to help to move Switzerland even faster on everything which is this new opportunities. Which digitalization is a great thing to our daily life, but also in companies. With this we had only a natural seed grant for getting these companies that a part of the association to also support us on the Kickstart acceleration. The Kickstart Accelerator is one of the programs, currently the biggest program in this association, in which really is focused on accelerating not only companies, but in general, Switzerland, in this process of new opportunities in digital abroad.

Audrow:
Okay. How many batches of companies has the program had so far? How many three month groups have gone through?

Matt:
There’s only one, up til now. So the-

Audrow:
First one?

Matt:
Yes. Now we will send out to call soon for the second batch which will be end of summer next year. So, typically from the middle of August to November.

Audrow:
What do you hope from this program? Where do you hope it is in five years?

Roland:
I think there is a couple of elements, which hopefully is probable agreement, and we had very good experience over this year. Alongside, I think it really should Switzerland, speed up in general in this innovation and progression field. Switzerland is already pretty well set up, but you should never sleep in. You should really push forward. That’s one element. Of course, probably the most important element is also to have, to bring science, politics, big corporates, and startups together. This was I think, a wonderful experience and the beginning we hoped, and we have seen that it works. So we have really the CEOs and CTOs from big companies coming to this place where these young and crazy young people work on their ideas. They mingle together, they network together, they dabble up visions together, and I think this should be even stronger next year and hopefully be the unique selling point for the kickstart accelerator in Switzerland.

Of course, we would like also to convince some young people with great ideas to probably then continue to work in Switzerland, or incorporate their companies in Switzerland, or at least have a strong link with Switzerland. Also, this vision we had in the beginning was really moving extremely nicely forward so we have the clear majority of the whole startups we had in the Kickstart Accelerator will continue to have a footprint in Switzerland. Some of them are now incorporating Switzerland, others have started a second branch in Switzerland, and the other group has at least very strong collaboration now already with Swiss companies.

Audrow:
Matt, do you have anything to add for where you hope to be in five years?

Matt:
I hope to be still here in five years, so that’s always … It depends on our work. That this program is there in five years, so I hope to deliver the next four years. For us, it’s really improving every year, I’m just coming from several feedback calls. I hope to be on a position where I can, where we are not only on the same level, but really on a higher level than both of the accelerators that exist right now. That we really have proven our approach is the right one. There is no right approach but it’s a very good approach. Let’s put it that way.

Audrow:
Okay. Thank you.

Roland:
Thanks.

Image: Oliver Deussen and Thomas Lindemeier, University of Konstanz

The 2017 second annual robotic art competition with $100,000 in cash prizes is now open for team registration. An international competition for all ages, the contest’s goal is to challenge teams to produce something visually beautiful with robotics—that is, to have a robot use physical brushes and paint to create an artwork. It’s ideal for students or professionals involved in robotic planning and image processing, especially those who have an appreciation for art.

There is no cost to enter and any robotic system can be used to produce the artwork. While most teams are using existing robotic arms, the contest is open to custom hardware. Teams can enter up to six paintings in each of the competition categories of “original artwork” and “reinterpreted artwork” where a reference image or existing artwork is used as a reference.

We will again have a combination of professional art critics, tech celebrities, and the general public score the artwork. You can also signup now to be notified when it’s time to come see the artwork submissions and vote.

Image: National Taiwan University

In last year’s competition, the expectations were modest—get as many teams as possible to setup a robot that can do any sort of painting. We believe that we succeeded. In total, there were 16 teams from seven countries who submitted over 70 different artworks!

Winners were determined based on a combination of public voting (over 2200 people with a Facebook account voted), five judges consisting of working artists, critics, and technologists, and by how well the team met the spirit of the competition—in this case, to create something beautiful using a physical brush and robotics and to share what they learned with others.

Details, team signup, and last year’s winners are at robotart.org.

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Torsten Oelkes, Executive Chairman of CUBE, about the CUBE Tech Fair. The CUBE Tech Fair is a conference that takes place in Berlin in May that seeks to facilitate connections between companies. The Tech Fair also features a start up competition where the winner will be awarded €1,000,000 without exchange of equity or debt. In this interview, Toresten talks about CUBE’s business model, the robotic companies they’re affiliated with, the CUBE Tech Fair, and the €1,000,000 prize.

Torsten Oelke

For the past 15 years Dr. Torsten Oelke has been an active player in the German digital economy. As a businessman, he built up companies and incubators. Besides his business activities, he serves as advisor to the German Minister of Economic Affairs.

Torsten is the Executive Chairman of CUBE , a global ecosystem to connect startups with leading industry players. He has assembled a team of international experts with extensive experience with industry and startups. CUBE is backed by several board members of global corporates across industries.

Links

• CUBE’s website
• Tech Fair website
• Download mp3 (28.1 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

We have just taken another momentous step in the journey to unveil the hidden wonders of our own planet!

Since the launch of the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco in December 2015, individuals from around the world have been racing to form Teams and develop a range of groundbreaking technologies to access the deep-sea. Registration closed at the end of September 2016 with 32 bold Teams stepping forward to take on the challenge of mapping and imaging our ocean as never before.

Today, we announce the 21 semi-finalists Teams advancing in the Ocean Discovery XPRIZE. These innovative semi-finalist Teams, consisting of almost 350 individuals from 25 countries, represent a broad, impressive diversity of backgrounds and expertise, including middle and high school students, university students, maker-movement enthusiasts, and water and ocean industry professionals.

This diversity is also reflected in the array of technologies and techniques the semi-finalist Teams are developing. Some are proposing to use drones as a mechanism to drop subsea instruments into the water, while others are proposing to use drones that not only go through air, but then dive into the watery depths. Non-aerial Entries include autonomous surface vehicles carrying subsea robots that will return to the ‘mothership’ when their work is done, as well as vehicles and robots that will remain beneath the sea surface from the moment they leave the shore.

The 21 semi-finalist Teams will now have to prove their technology in the field in Round 1 testing, which will take place later this year. As with every XPRIZE, the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE sets audacious goals. In Round 1, the Entries that these Teams are developing will have only 16 hours to map the sea-floor at depths of 2000m and produce a high-resolution map (at least 5m horizontal resolution, at least 0.5m vertical resolution) of at least 20% of the 500km2 Competition Area. Additionally, Teams will have to bring back 5 images of an archeological, biological, or geological feature, as well as an image of an object that we will specify. As if this wasn’t enough, they have an additional hurdle to overcome – they will have to deploy from the shore with no humans allowed in the competition area.

To put this challenge into perspective, it can take days to map 500 km2 of the ocean using current state-of-the-art technologies. If you want 5m accuracy, mapping can take over a week and requires going out on a ship, which can easily cost over $60,000 per day, making it a very expensive endeavor. The cutting-edge technology that will come out of this XPRIZE will truly revolutionize our ability to access the ocean.

In addition to the main Prize of $6 million, a dozen Teams have also opted to compete for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Bonus Prize of $1 million. These Teams are developing pioneering technology to detect a chemical or biological signal underwater and then autonomously track that signal back to its source.

Partnering with us to truly make this competition a global success are industry titans, Fugro and Esri. Fugro, the industry leader in ocean mapping and survey, will be provide the baseline maps against which the judging panel will assess the Entries. Esri, the global leader in GIS, is providing software to the Teams to produce their maps.

We are looking forward to an exciting competition with exponentially evolving technologies, including smart underwater robots, robot swarms, drones, and artificial intelligence to perform the tasks that have been laid out. These Teams will really take us where no one has gone before! As their journeys of discovery set sail, we invite you to follow the competion and this phenomenal mission to map our beautiful planet.

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

• XPRIZE calling all innovators to help map our ocean
• Unmanned and underneath: Stay in the know about underwater drones
• Into the deep: Underwater machines keep an eye on climate change
• What you need to know about underwater drones
• CoCoRo: Tracking the development of the world’s largest autonomous underwater swarm
• Ocean-going robot fleet successfully completes fish-tracking mission

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

Kickstart Accelerator, one of Europe’s largest multi-corporate, zero-equity technology accelerators and an initiative of digitalswitzerland, has today announced that applications are open to international startups for its second programme.

Kickstart Accelerator will select a shortlist of up to 30 startups who will participate in an 11-week programme designed to help them develop their ideas and products across one of the programme’s verticals, including robotics & intelligent systems. In order to tap into unexplored innovation potential, Kickstart Accelerator has entered into a partnership with BaseLaunch (initiated and operated by BaselArea.swiss) to offer a healthcare-specific vertical in the life sciences hotspot Basel.

Image: Philippe Rossier

Successful applicants will be international startups with promising business ideas that have the potential to disrupt the chosen verticals and benefit the wider society. The accelerator will be operated by Impact Hub Zurich, which is part of the largest international network of entrepreneurship and innovation centers, giving the startups access to the brightest talent across the globe.

Patricia Schlenter, Programme Manager at Kickstart Accelerator, said,

Our inaugural year saw over 850 applications from across the globe and so we are looking forward to seeing the calibre of this year’s innovators. The Swiss ecosystem offers startups the opportunity to work with like-minded entrepreneurs, experienced mentors and some of the biggest corporate players to deliver impactful innovations to key industries.

This year’s shortlisted startups will meet with over 15 corporate partners and mentors, including Switzerland’s largest ICT provider Swisscom, multinational insurance firms Swiss Life and AXA Winterthur, Swiss financial services companies Credit Suisse, UBS and Raiffeisen, global consultancy firms EY and PwC, as well as Switzerland`s largest food retailers Migros and Coop among others.

Image: Philippe Rossier

The 2016 cohort led to six partnerships between the startups and corporates. Applicants for 2017 will also have the opportunity to secure a ‘Proof of Concept’ trial with one of the corporate partners. These trials will allow the startups to test the application and scalability of their products in a demanding corporate environment. The trials will also provide the startups with the best possible chance of exploring longer-term commercial partnerships with leading corporate titans and the opportunity to further develop their market offering.

Carola Wahl, Head of Transformation & Market Management at AXA Winterthur, says,

Innovation is a key area of focus for our business and we are committed to working closely with other companies to promote and strengthen Switzerland’s status as an innovation and digital hub. We are particularly interested in ‘smart cities’ as they will strongly influence society’s mobility and have a major impact on the insurance industry. Cooperation between the startups and corporate partners will allow the entrepreneurs to benefit from the corporates’ know-how and large customer networks, as well as enable them to develop new technologies and disruptive products together.

The programme will begin on 4 September, with the official Opening Ceremony taking place on 7 September in the accelerator space at the ewz-Unterwerk Selnau. The Final Demo Day and closing event will be held on 17 November, where each team will present their products to investors, corporate leaders and the media. The ewz-Unterwerk Selnau, an 8,611 sq ft. (800 sq m) industrial building, will house co-working areas, meeting rooms, brainstorming areas, pitching stages and relaxation zones designed from old shipping containers to create a collaborative environment for creativity and success.

Image: Philippe Rossier

Kickstart will not be taking any equity from the participating startups. Founders will have the chance to win up to 25`000 CHF, as well as receiving a monthly founder stipend and masterclass sessions with mentors from the corporate partners and the Swiss innovation ecosystem. Kickstart aims to develop close collaboration between the corporate partners and the startups, as well as between the startups themselves across the different verticals, during and beyond the duration of the programme.

Nicolas Bürer, Managing Director of digitalswitzerland, commented, “With the second edition taking place in Zurich and the extension of the programme to Basel, Kickstart will be one step closer to becoming the largest European startup Accelerator. digitalswitzerland is also looking to extend the scope of the programme and is carrying out research ahead of establishing Kickstart Accelerator and additional verticals in Lausanne. This is another step towards establishing Switzerland as a leading digital innovation hub worldwide.”

To apply for the programme, please visit: www.kickstart-accelerator.com.

The DOME Project of the Digger Foundation has been shortlisted as finalist of the
prestigious Robotics Award for Good taking place in Dubai in February 2017, where
a $1million price will be awarded to the best competitor among 10
international teams.

Mine clearance is a fundamental effort of international organizations like the United Nations, which is considering this threat as a top humanitarian priority. The world is now facing new kinds of warfare, as in Iraq and Syria, where cities are the main battlefields. Thus new Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) and Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) clearance challenges arise. The problem is so huge that the United Nations estimate that it will take decades to clear Syria of all unexploded devices, from hand grenades to hundreds kilogram aviation bombs and IED’s. Today, mine clearance is mainly done by hand, which is not only extremely dangerous, but also very slow and expensive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkyXYx15vFE&feature=youtu.be

Since 1998, the Digger Foundation has successfully led de-mining projects in many countries, including Bosnia, Senegal, Mozambique and, in 2016, Angola. In rural areas, its main tool is the DIGGER 250, a 12-ton armored and remote controlled machine capable of destroying mines buried up to 20 centimeters into the ground. As a Swiss-based, non profit organization specialized in high-technology and robotics equipment dedicated to humanitarian demining, the Foundation will address the new challenge of de-mining safely in urban areas with the DOME project.

The DOME project combines robotics, bionic systems and pragmatism to bring an effective solution adapted to this new reality of urban mine clearance. The Digger Foundation has leveraged almost 20 years of field experience and research to come up with a reliable and cost-efficient concept. It solves two distinct issues: on one hand, the localization of explosive material under the rubble; on the other hand, its subsequent destruction. In a first step, mine detection dogs equipped with a DIGGER harnes–made of a GPS tracker, a camera and a loudspeaker–are deployed on the area. The combination of their smell and the smart harness will allow the dog’s handler to map precisely the location of explosives. Effective de-mining will begin with the rubble clearance and/or the transfer of the dangerous device to an open, secure space, to proceed with its destruction. This second step, during which an explosion can happen at any time, requires mechanical tools available on-site. The DOME solution is to use mass produced construction machines which will be transformed into robots and tele-operated from a safe distance, since the pilot will be able to operate the machine through a cockpit displayed in virtual reality goggles. Thus, no human lives will be put at risk even in case of a powerful explosion.

The demonstration of the DOME system will take place in Dubai on February 18 and 19
February 2017. The winner of the competition will be rewarded a $1million prize.

Click here for more information from the Digger Foundation.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also want to listen to these Robohub Podcasts:

• Robots Podcast #082: Demining and defusing, with Frédéric Guerne and Paul Bosscher
• Robots Podcast #219: ICRA 2016: Landmine Detection Challenge, with Edson Prestes

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

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Edson Prestes, Professor at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and an organizer of the Humanitarian Robotics and Automation Technology Challenge (HRATC) 2016 competition. The HRATC competition challenges teams around the world to develop methods of controlling robots to detect land mines in large open environments.

According to the UN Mine Action Service, landmines kill 15,000–20,000 people every year (mostly children) and maim countless more across 78 countries. Demining efforts cost US 300–1000 USD per mine, and, for every 5000 mines cleared, one person is killed and two are injured. Thus, clearing post-combat regions of landmines has proven to be a difficult, risky, dangerous and expensive task with enormous social implications for civilians.

Edson Prestes

Edson Prestes received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Science(CS) from the Federal University of Pará (UFPa), Brazil, in 1996 and M.Sc. and Ph.D. in CS from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, in 1999 and 2003, respectively. He is a CNPq Productivity Fellow (Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) for his contribution to Brazilian Scientific Progress. Edson is Professor at UFRGS, since 2005, and Head of ϕ-Robotics Research Group.

Links

• Download mp3 (11.1 MB)
• Competition Website
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)

After five years of competition by more than 40 different teams from around the globe, NASA’s Sample Return Robot Challenge has reached its final stage. The top seven teams will compete for the $1.36 million prize purse on the campus of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Massachusetts, Sept. 4-6.

In this final round of the challenge, teams have up to two hours each to locate as many as 10 unknown samples that vary in size, shape, location and difficulty. The samples are classified as easy, intermediate and hard and are assigned corresponding point values. One team could win the entire prize purse, or multiple teams could share a percentage of the prize.

The three-day event will conclude with an awards ceremony and press conference at 11:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Sept. 6, at the Quadrangle at WPI. WPI is located at 100 Institute Road in Worcester.

Participants at the press conference will be:

• Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts
• NASA Administrator Charles Bolden
• Laurie Leshin, president, WPI
• Dennis Andrucyk, deputy associate administrator, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate

Qualifying teams for the final round are:

• Team Al – Toronto, Canada
• Alabama Astrobotics – Tuscaloosa, Alabama
• MAXed Out – Santa Clara, California
• Mind & Iron – Seattle, Washington
• Sirius – South Hadley, Massachusetts
• Survey – Los Angeles
• West Virginia University Mountaineers – Morgantown, West Virginia

Prior to this final round of competition, the teams competed in Level 1, where robots had to return two known sample types but from an unknown location within 30 minutes without human control or the aid of Earth-based technologies, such as GPS or magnetic compassing. Since the challenge began in 2012, only seven teams have advanced to Level 2.

The Sample Return Robot Challenge, part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges Program, aims to encourage innovation in robotics technologies relevant to space exploration and broader applications that benefit life on Earth. This event brings together tech-savvy citizens, entrepreneurs, educators and students to demonstrate robots that can locate and collect geologic samples from a wide and varied landscape without human control and within a specified time.

NASA’s Centennial Challenges program is part of the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). STMD uses challenges to gather the best and brightest minds in academia, industry and government to drive innovation and enable solutions in important technology focus areas. WPI has hosted the Sample Return Robot Challenge since it began in 2012.

The event will be streamed live at:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-msfc

For more information about the competition, visit their website.

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

Robohub covered the Airbus Shopfloor Challenge that took place during #ICRA16 in Stockholm. Below, you can see an extensive photo gallery as part of our coverage. Check it out!

Team Naist

Team Naist, from Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan won first prize. They used a KUKA robot arm, an advanced head with stabilizing rods, and an advanced computer vision system that enabled them to drill holes efficiently and with great precision.

Team CriGroup

Team CriGroup is based at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, within Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. They used ready made parts and a Denso arm with a special focus on software. Their method produced an innovative drilling pattern that minimized robot motion. They came in second place.

Team Sirado

Team Sirado brings together 6 researchers from the graduate School of Engineering, Arts et Métiers Lille campus, and 3 experienced industrial representatives from KUKA Systems Aerospace France, and KUKA Automatisme Robotique SAS. They also used a KUKA arm and a specially designed drill unit. Sirado took third place in the competition.

Team R3

R3 is a robotics collective based out of Ryerson University in Ontario, Canada. Their custom-made XY platform used 7 drill bits in one unit to drill many holes at once. They performed two rounds and competed on the final round.

Team Vayu

Team Vayu from India brings together five undergraduate students who share a passion for aerospace. They had the simplest approach with a compact 3 axis robot that performed well throughout the challenge.

Team Akita Prefectural University

Japanese team Akita Prefectural University implemented a unique solution for the challenge. Their robot used a delta-based solution to place the drill bit accurately. The arms themselves used rolled metallic tape under restrictors to extend and contract. They were able to demonstrate their setup, but weren’t able to compete.

Team Bug Eaters

The Bug Eaters team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA is made up of four undergraduate Mechanical and Materials Engineering students. Their robot is an innovative version of the delta robot, but issues with their motors didn’t allow them to perform.

A special thanks to Robohub readers for voting for your favorite videos in the People’s Choice Award, this year’s videos have been viewed more than 70’000 times in the past two weeks! You can view all the videos here.

Best Video

Best Robot Video

Best Student Video

Most Entertaining Video

Best Application of AI

People’s Choice Award

Voting is simple, just give all your favorite videos a “thumbs up” on YouTube (you may need to click through to youtube to vote). The video with the most thumbs up will be awarded the People’s Choice Award at the AAAI-16 Video Competition Award Ceremony on February 15 in Phoenix, Arizona. Voting closes on February 14 at midnight (Arizona time).

The goal of the competition is to show the world how much fun AI is by documenting exciting artificial intelligence advances in research, education, and application.

And make sure to spread the word – feel free to embed the videos or share through social media. Last year’s videos were viewed over 1 million times!

You can watch all the videos from this year’s competition here, or watch them below.

Robocup 2013 in Eindhoven. Photo credit: Ralf Roletschek via Wikimedia Commons.

From Grand Challenges such as the recent DRC, to STEM events such as FIRST, to startup pitches such as Robot Launch, competitions have been used to push the state of the art in the field, inspire the next generation of technology experts, create networking opportunities between startups and investors, and much more. But how effective are competitions in meeting these goals? What do participants, coaches and organizers think? Why are competitions important to the field of robotics?

We are surveying participants, team leaders and organizers of robotics competitions to find out. If you have ever been involved in a robotics competition, please take 5-10 minutes to share your experience with us.

Our goal is for the survey results to serve as a reference about the effect of robotics competitions on education, research and business, and to gauge whether participants prefer this nontraditional approach to learning and gaining experience in the field.

The results will be published on Robohub along with an analysis of robotics competitions as a tool for meeting various objectives. Your input will make a difference – please take 5-10 minutes to complete this survey on robotics competitions, and share the link with your friends and colleagues.

Thanks!

Entrants in the Soft Robotics Competitions use the intellectual resources provided in the Soft Robotics Toolkit to design and build their own soft robots. (Photo by Eliza Grinnell/SEAS Communications.)

By Adam Zewe | SEAS

If you have a soft spot for robotics, this competition is right up your alley. With separate tracks for academic researchers, college students, and high school students, the 2016 Soft Robotics Competition offers anyone with an interest in robotics the chance to design and build their own soft robot using the resources available in the open-source Soft Robotics Toolkit.

Now in its second year, the competition was developed by Conor Walsh, assistant professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Dónal Holland, visiting lecturer in engineering sciences, as a way to encourage individuals to take advantage of the resources provided in the Soft Robotics Toolkit.

Further reading:

 

Robots Podcast #180: Soft Robotics Toolkit, with Donal Holland

Interview with Soft Robotics’ Carl Vause

The real soft robots that inspired Baymax, with Chris Atkeson

Morphological computation: The hidden superpower of soft-bodied robots

Sign up for our newsletter.

The toolkit, which incorporates contributions from researchers from Harvard and other institutions, provides a set of intellectual tools that one can use to design and construct a robot using soft, flexible materials. It includes resources such as step-by-step instructions on building actuators and sensors, lists of suggested materials, and how-to fabrication videos.

The ultimate goal of the competition is to encourage others to find innovative applications for soft robotics technology and continue expanding interest in this relatively new field.

“Last year, we were really impressed with the variety and quality of entries,” Holland said. “The participants came up with fantastic ideas that we never would have thought of, and we hope that this year we will receive even more submissions.”

The inaugural contest, which drew 87 initial entries from around the world, has been expanded to include separate categories for academic researchers, college students, and high school students.

Last year, some of the most unique entries were submitted by high school students, such as a wearable glove that detects and controls tremor, and a teddy bear that hugs back. Since many high school students don’t have access to 3D printers and other high-tech equipment commonly found on university campuses, organizers established a separate high school category this year, explained research fellow Max Herman.

“We hope this will enable even more people to participate this year,” he said. “Our goal is to lower the barrier of entry into the area of soft robotics.”

Entries in the high school and college competitions must be novel and should incorporate at least one component technology from the Soft Robotics Toolkit website. Students will document their projects using a “wiki” that includes at least four sections: background, design, fabrication, and testing.

Entrants in the academic research competition must submit work that has either been published or accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal or conference proceeding. In addition, entrants must provide details of the research on the Soft Robotics Toolkit website before June, with a focus on replicable processes. The quality of the documentation will be a factor in the judging process.

The competition opens in January and entries will be accepted through June. There is no cost to enter the competition and prizes will be awarded to the developers of the top projects in all three categories. Winning projects will also be featured on the Soft Robotics Toolkit website.

Click here for detailed information about competition rules, eligibility, and entry guidelines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbLF_gp9RkI

The Airbus Shopfloor Challenge invites robotics teams from around the world to create innovative robotic solutions for a real-life manufacturing challenge, and compete live at the IEEE 2016 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 15-21 May 2016 in Stockholm, Sweden. Deadline to apply is March 15, 2016.

About the Airbus Shopfloor Challenge

With a backlog of almost 7000 aircraft on order, at Airbus we are constantly innovating to find ways to improve our manufacturing processes by integrating emerging robotic technologies into our production lines.

Each aircraft is assembled through hundreds of thousands of point-based process steps. Most tasks involve a drilling process, a point-checking (i.e. measurement) process, and a tightening process. While some operations are automated, many remain manual due to a number of constraints – including space and weight restrictions. Using lightweight automation to perform such tasks would reduce the volume of the most repetitive, physically challenging labour of thousands of aircraft operators.

Because each generation of our manufacturing lines has a lifetime of more than a decade, robotic solutions need to be integrated into existing production environments, with no dedicated physical infrastructure. Accuracy requirements are stringent, and quality is paramount. Since errors in a single step can lead to costly fixes and even disruptions in production, solutions have to meet high reliability standards. In addition, they have to be cost effective in order to be widely deployed in existing Airbus factories.

Competing teams will design and build an autonomous lightweight robotic system able to perform accurate drilling compliant with aeronautic standards. Robots will perform several rounds of a simplified drilling task on an artefact representing part of the aircraft fuselage. Success will be measured based on the number of holes drilled within a specified time and accuracy. Some of the holes will be more challenging due to access constraints. Weight cost of the robot will also be taken into account.

Airbus will send panels to qualifying teams. We are willing to support contestants with equipment and material, subject to their proposal and needs.

The winning Airbus Shopfloor Challenge team will receive a cash prize, but more importantly, the team will have the opportunity to develop their idea for commercial application within Airbus. Other teams with promising solutions may also be invited to develop their idea further with Airbus.

Challenge details

The competition will run live during ICRA 2016. It will consist of multiple 60-minute rounds of drilling holes in an aluminium panel representing an aircraft part. The final round will be a confrontation between the top two teams.

The robot must be able to drill over the whole surface while installed on a fixed station. Multiple arms/effectors are allowed as a solution, as long as adequate fleet/synchronisation management is performed.

Hand-held electrical tools are currently used as end effectors, but participants are free to propose their own system. Manual lubrication is allowed. Airbus will work with qualifying teams to supply drilling tools and cutters.

No data transmission or remote control will be permitted during a round.

All algorithms must use an open source system as the main driver.

To qualify for the contest, the robot has to be:

• Modularly designed, at least at the arm level
• Weigh less than 100kg

Learn more about prizes, rules and how to apply here. 

As part of the total $7M prize purse, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is offering a $1M bonus prize to teams that demonstrate their technology can “sniff out” a specified object in the ocean through biological and chemical signals. David Schewitz, Shell vice president of geophysics for the Americas, and Richard Spinrad, chief scientist at NOAA, joined Diamandis on stage to launch the new competition.

“Our oceans cover two-thirds of our planet’s surface and are a crucial global source of food, energy, economic security, and even the air we breathe, yet 95 percent of the deep sea remains a mystery to us,” Diamandis said. “In fact, we have better maps of the surface of Mars than we do of our own seafloor. The Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE will address a critical ocean challenge by accelerating innovation to further explore one of our greatest unexplored frontiers.”

The three-year competition includes nine months for team registration, 12 months for initial solution development and 18 months to complete two rounds of testing and judging by an expert panel. In each round, teams will complete a series of tasks, including making a bathymetric map (a map of the sea floor), producing high-resolution images of a specific object, and identifying archeological, biological or geological features. Teams also must show resiliency and durability by proving they can operate their technologies, deployed from the shore or air, at a depth of up to 4,000 meters.

“Spurring innovation and creating radical breakthroughs in ocean discovery are what excite us about collaborating with XPRIZE,” Schewitz said. “Shell recognizes the need to leverage the full power of innovation: the capacity for doing things differently and better than before.”

A $4M Grand Prize and $1M Second Place Prize will be awarded to the two teams that receive the top scores for demonstrating the highest resolution seafloor mapping, after meeting all minimum requirements for speed, autonomy and depth. Up to 10 teams that proceed to Round 2 will split a $1M milestone prize purse. And the $1M NOAA bonus prize will be awarded to the team that can trace a chemical or biological signal to its source.

“The goal of the $1M NOAA bonus prize is to identify technology that can aid in detecting sources of pollution, enable rapid response to leaks and spills, identify hydrothermal vents and methane seeps, as well as track marine life for scientific research and conservation efforts,” said Spinrad.

The Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE is part of the 10-year XPRIZE Ocean Initiative – a commitment made to launch five multi-million dollar prizes by 2020 to address critical ocean challenges and make the oceans healthy, valued and understood. XPRIZE awarded the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup XCHALLENGE in 2011 and the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE in July 2015.

For more information, and to register your intent to compete, visit oceandiscovery.xprize.org.

About XPRIZE
Founded in 1995, XPRIZE is the leading organization solving the world’s Grand Challenges by creating and managing large-scale, high-profile, incentivized prizes in five areas: Learning; Exploration; Energy & Environment; Global Development; and Life Sciences. Active prizes include the $30M Google Lunar XPRIZE, the $20M NRG Cosia Carbon XPRIZE, the $15M Global Learning XPRIZE, the $10M Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, and the $7M Adult Literacy XPRIZE. For more information, visit www.xprize.org.

About Royal Dutch Shell
Shell has been a technology pioneer for more than 100 years, and has come up with many industry-transforming “firsts” to deliver energy its customers and partners need. Since 2007, Shell has spent more than $1 billion annually on research and development. In 2014, our research and development expenditures were $1.2 billion. Shell’s technical and engineering staff amount to more than 43,000.

Shell companies have operations in more than 70 countries and territories with businesses including oil and gas exploration and production; production and marketing of liquefied natural gas and gas to liquids; manufacturing, marketing and shipping of oil products and chemicals and renewable energy projects. Royal Dutch Shell plc is incorporated in England and Wales, has its headquarters in The Hague and is listed on the London, Amsterdam, and New York stock exchanges. For further information, visit www.shell.com.

About National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a science-based federal agency within the Department of Commerce with regulatory, operational and information service responsibilities with a presence in every state and U.S. territories. NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine resources. For more information, visit www.noaa.gov.

An excited crowd cheers for students in 2.70 (the precursor of 2.007) as they compete in the final competition in 1979. Photo courtesy of the MIT Museum.

Alissa Mallinson | Department of Mechanical Engineering

It’s hard to ignore the fact that a worldwide maker movement is well underway. Over the past 10 or so years, community Maker Faires have become all the rage; fabrication shops have popped up around the world for both professionals and hobbyists; and websites, tools, and toys catering to do-it-yourselfers are on the rise.

It’s easy to appreciate how a love for making became wildly popular again, especially as STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) is increasingly and passionately promoted and embraced around the world.

Of course, at MIT — particularly in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) — it’s been this way since 1865.

It was around that time that MIT was founded by scientist and educator William Barton Rogers, who had a different idea about how to educate and learn. He founded MIT to teach not only the ability to think critically but also how to apply that thinking to real-world problems — to teach craftsmen and farmers as well as engineers and academics. From that moment on, it’s been in MechE DNA to upend traditional ways of teaching and to democratize science and technology for the betterment of all.

So the motto was coined (“mens et manus,” or “mind and hand”), the seal was drawn (the scholar and the smith), and by the 1970s, when Professor Emeritus Woodie Flowers was transforming course 2.70 — now 2.007 (Design and Manufacturing) — into a project-based, get-your-hands-dirty, build-competition experience, MechE’s reputation for innovative education was already solidified. Yet the magnitude of transforming a design and manufacturing class from a mostly pencil-and-paper experience to one of fun and hands-on building was a profound paradigm shift in engineering education.

Knowledge is of course essential, Flowers says, because uninformed imagination can be quite dangerous, but at the same time, “nobody is getting hired to solve the multiple-choice problems at the end of the chapter.”

He created a class to prepare students not only to design an object but also to build it. From the beginning, 2.007 was meant to develop students’ competence and self-confidence as design engineers, while emphasizing the creative design process and the application of physical laws.

“I learned from my father that doing things in a different way was often fruitful, and the underpinnings of all my educational efforts is to allow people a path to change their self-image,” Flowers says. “Students might struggle with equations and other rigorous elements of an MIT education, but in 2.007 they can be superstars.”

The first challenges were purely mechanical traps and contraptions, using a universal set of materials pre-determined by Flowers, and the students loved it. Their creations went head-to-head at end-of-year competitions that became the most attended events at the Institute.

Since then, several faculty members have followed in Flowers’ footsteps as instructor of 2.70/2.007, including Professor Emeritus David Gordon; Wilson; former Professor Harry West; Professor Alex Slocum; and Professor Dan Frey, each imbuing the class with a bit of their own style and personality. Along the way, the contraption competition became a robot competition, mechanical components became electromechanical ones, wires became remote controllers, and autonomous challenges were introduced.

And yet, says Assistant Professor Amos Winter, “The fundamental principles of 2.007 haven’t changed. Because core mechanical principles like forces, energy, bearings, and shafts work the same as they always have and haven’t gone out of style. Whether a car uses internal combustion or is a hybrid, it still comes down to transferring power to the road.”

In 2013, Professor Dan Frey passed the torch to Associate Professor Sangbae Kim and Winter, who are co-instructing the class. Kim is a renowned expert in biomimetics and robotics, and Winter is a leader in designing technologies for developing and emerging markets. Together the two have made several curriculum updates to the class, including eliminating exams and adding weekly written homework, weekly physical homework, and an oral design review.

As is the tradition now, the class ends in a final robot competition in which students compete against each other to see whose robot can win the most points. Each student is required to enter the competition, but only 32 finalists will enter the ring on competition day.

“The most exciting thing about 2.007 is that the students get to build their own personal robot and compete in front of an audience of more than 500 people,” Kim says. “We create a new theme every year, having in mind a particular physical task that will require the students to apply the theories they’ve learned to specific engineering functions and transfer their knowledge from paper to working robot.”

This spring’s competition was called “Hack to the Future,” a nod to the classic film “Back to the Future,” which had its 30th anniversary this fall. Using a universal kit of tools and materials, students were challenged to build a robot that could collect plutonium, climb the Clock Tower, slide Doc Brown down a cable, and open a DeLorean door. As always students each developed their own strategies for gaining points, and the student whose robot earned the most points at the end of each duel progressed to the next round until there was only one champion left standing: Alison Edwards, whose robot was efficient and reliable.

“I hope students in 2.007 walk away from the class with engineering intuition,” Winter says. “I want them to go out into the world around them and almost have a kind of superpower — to see what’s going on behind face value, like forces, and stresses, and energy transfer. It’s that kind of intuition that we try to build by bringing real-world examples into the classroom and showing them how to match theory with what actually happens.”

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

• Talking Machines: History of machine learning, w. Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun
• NSF’s 40-year history supporting US robotics research
• The evolution of assembly lines: A brief history
• Funding high risk proposals at the National Science Foundation: A brief history
• Father of robotics Joseph F. Engelberger dies at age 90

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

A significant obstacle to robots achieving their full potential in practical applications is the difficulty in manipulating an array of diverse objects. The Humans to Robots Lab at Brown is driving change in this area by using Baxter to collect and record manipulation experiences for one million real-world objects.

Central to the research at the Humans to Robots Lab is the standardization and distribution of learned experience, where advances on one robot in the network will improve every robot. This research seeks to exponentially accelerate the advancement in capabilities of robots around the world, and establish a framework by which the utility of these types of systems advances at a pace never before seen.

To better collaborate with labs around the world, Professor Stefanie Tellex and the team at Brown use the Baxter robot, an industrial robot platform that has the capability to automatically scan and collect a database of object models, the flexibility of an open source software development kit and an affordable price that makes the platform accessible to researchers all over the world. As a result of the Rethink Robotics Video Challenge, Brown will have an additional Baxter that will accelerate this research, while also providing new opportunities for continued experimentation.

“Our goal in creating the Rethink Robotics Video Challenge was to raise awareness of the tremendous amount of unique, cutting-edge research being conducted using collaborative robots that advances our collective education. The response far exceeded our expectations, and narrowing this down to one winner was an extremely difficult task for our judging panel,” said Rodney Brooks, founder, chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics. “Brown was ultimately chosen as the best entry because the work being conducted by the Humans to Robots Lab at Brown University is critical to helping robots become more functional in our daily lives. There is a stark contrast between a robot and human in the ability to manipulate and handle a variety of objects, and closing that gap will open up a whole new world of robotic applications.”

Educational institutions, research labs and companies from around the world submitted an abstract and video showcasing their work with Baxter in one of three categories: engineering education, engineering research, or manufacturing skills development. The submissions encompassed a wide range of work, including elementary school STEM education, assistance to the physically and visually impaired, mobility and tele-operation, advanced and distributed machine learning and cloud-based knowledge-sharing for digital manufacturing and IoT, to name a few. After a detailed vetting process, the field was narrowed to 10 finalists from the following organizations: Brown University, Cornell University, Dataspeed Inc., Glyndwr University, Idiap Research Institute, North Carolina State University, Queens University, University of Connecticut, University of Sydney and Virginia Beach City Public Schools.

Finalist entries were reviewed by a premier panel of judges, including Rodney Brooks of Rethink Robotics; Lance Ulanoff, chief correspondent and editor-at-large of Mashable; Erico Guizzo, senior editor at IEEE Spectrum; Steve Taub, senior director, advanced manufacturing at GE Ventures; and Devdutt Yellurkar, general partner at CRV.

To view the ten finalist entries, please visit www.rethinkrobotics.com/videos.

Source: ELROB

Robotic competitions have sprung up like mushrooms. Beside the obvious ones like EURATHLON, RoboCross, DARPA and MBZIRC, there are hundreds of smaller contests all over the world. Some of them are academic in nature, and some try to address real world scenarios. An even smaller fraction of the latter deal with outdoor/off-road robotics in hazardous environments — these competitions usually involve a Search and Rescue (SAR) or Hazardous Materials Incident Response Operation (HAZOPER) incident. And this is where the lab meets real life! Unfortunately, it’s also where end-users are too often disappointed when their expectations — often buoyed by roboticists’ own overestimations — are not met.

Why does this happen? All too often competition scenarios are designed without deeply consulting with real practitioners like first responders and emergency service workers. This is usually because end-users’ operational requirements are so far beyond today’s robotic capabilities that participating in a competition truly designed around their needs is unrealistic for most competitors. Organizers simply don’t want to spoil all the fun!

Let’s look at an example. euRathlon 2015 was an exciting multi-robot-multi-domain competition that used the Fukushima accident as an emergency-response scenario. In one of the scenario’s the users asked for a building with massive walls, best enforced with metal. This would reflect the limitations to radio communication they face in these environments. The teams were given loads of information beforehand, including the hint that there was a massive building to enter and that the circumstances would be difficult for radio communication. The organisers did their best to keep the information flowing. In the end the vast majority of teams turned up with commercial WiFi/WLAN equipment. That wouldn’t have been a serious problem in the first place if the autonomy had worked, but since that wasn’t the case, all attempts to remotely steer a robot into the building ended just behind the first door. WLAN simply cannot be used behind concrete walls. To cut a long story short: a lot of people felt blue, and this scenario was a disappointment for participants, organizers and end users alike.

What happened? The users asked for something that is almost impossible even with the professional equipment they use themselves. With levity, some of the roboticists promised autonomy while others overestimated their radio communication capabilities. And while you might criticise the researchers for being overly optimistic, or the end-users for setting their expectations too high, the reality is that you will find an analogue picture in more or less every robotics competition: feel free to read the articles by Steve Crowe (managing editor of Robotics Trends) about the “DARPA Robotics Challenge“, for example.

Lessons to be learned? The first real challenge is to get the users, field experts and practitioners to talk to the research and development people (and visa versa, of course). But only after they have found the same (or at least a similar) technical terminology and language. This might be an arduous process, but the individuals who survive the catharsis will be able to come up with something valuable. It is the sole responsibility of the competition organisers to ensure (if not enforce) this convergence and harmonisation.

The roboticists must understand that “the user” is first and most interested in task fulfilment, not in Time and Space complexity. They are interested in tools that make their work easier, safer, and that open new possibilities. Roboticists should test their systems not in artificial settings designed by academics, but in the same training facilities as the professionals use!

The potential users must understand that R&D people are not manufacturers. It is not the mission of a university to come up with an end-product. The focus of classic R&D is the investigation of scientific or engineering problems. If the users can formulate the problem properly, the roboticists might come up with a capability concept demonstrator that has Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 3-4, at maximum TRL 5.

Industry and SMEs are key figures in this process. They are the interface between user and R&D; it’s their role to transform the innovative R&D results into a mature product that meets the users’ needs. This is no doubt a tedious task. However, until now European companies have been too fainthearted to take initiative in this process. It might be one of the reasons why there are currently only a few established European robotics companies.

Since 2006 the European Land Robot Trial (ELROB) successfully combines all these aspects. ELROB offers realistic scenarios that have been developed in close co-operation with users and practitioners to reflect the most up-to-date en-user requirements.

Therefore the event is not organised as a competition but as a trial. First and foremost, this means ELROB is not about being crowned a winner and claiming a huge pot of prize money. Rather, the aim of the trial is to allow all participants to present their systems’ abilities under comparable and fair conditions. Instead of hiding their systems and code behind a shroud of secrecy, participants share experiences and work together synergistically. ELROB actively encourages an exchange of ideas and approaches between academia, industry and end-users, so that community as a whole has the chance to assess current technology as well as to pilot and govern further development. Both the tasks and the scenarios are designed by the users, and the performance of the systems is assessed by field experts. The event offers a fantastic opportunity to mingle with international experts from the field, industry and the R&D sector.

ELROB will mark its 10th anniversary in 2016. Europe’s oldest and toughest robotics event is again setting the pace by addressing the top areas of application:

• Reconnoitring of structures (with a focus on radiological and nuclear measuring and mapping)
• Mule (shuttle between two locations)
• Movements / Convoying (transport with two vehicles)
• Search & Rescue (SAR) / MedEvac (find and drag a dummy casualty)
• Reconnaissance and disposal of bombs and explosive devices (EOD/IED)

Generously supported by the Austrian Armed Forces, this time the event will be held at Tritolwerk — the proving ground used by the emergency forces and CBRNE units for training, and thus the perfect location for ELROB. The composition of the honourable judge team will ensure a good mixture between academia, users and industry.

If you are a roboticist and interested in real world applications, enrol now! SMEs and industry members should consider contributing to our exhibition. Users, practitioners and interested spectators are welcome to register at any time.

Looking forward to meeting you at ELROB 2016!

The Robot Race to Hawaii is a robotics contest where participants program a humanoid Nao robot to run a 10-meter race in the shortest time possible. The whole competition is run in a Webots simulation inside The Construct hosting platform. Participants need only a computer equipped with web browser to participate, and are not required to download any applications. There is no cost to enter.

The competition is simple, making it a good entry point and hands-on exercise for newcomers to robotics. The Construct provides the simulated environment with the robot already in it, as well as a sample controller that participants have the option to use as a starting point for building the walking controller. Because the challenge is hosted in The Construct and stored in the cloud, contestants participate via their web browser and do not need to worry about downloading and installing software.

Teachers, you can use this contest as an assignment for your students, as participants can expect to learn:

• How to code in Python. The controllers of the robots must be written in Python, which is one of the best languages for introducing someone to programming and especially to robotics. A good place to start learning about python is CodeAcademy.
• How a robotics simulator works. The simulator used for the contest is Webots. Participants must learn how this simulator works in order to understand how all the parts interact together (robot simulation, controller, computer, etc). Fortunately, there are nice tutorials to learn about it here.
• How to build models of objects for robot simulators. Throughout the competition, participants will be asked to create simulated models of simple objects, like a chair, a glass or a blackboard, once per week. This will provide them with deeper knowledge of what a simulation means. The same Webots tutorial linked to above contains information about how to create a model.
• The basics of biped walking. Even if the contest provides a sample controller allowing the robot to walk, participants may be interested in applying more complex techniques for robot walking. Learning about how to make a biped walk can help create faster controllers. You can learn about robot walking here or read many of the scientific papers available in the web.

More complex topics such as writing and compiling C++ controllers, using ROS as a robotics framework, or the programming of more complex robot skills like opening doors or grasping a objects have been deliberately left out of this challenge in order to make it suitable for people with minimal knowledge of robotics. STEM high school students and first year robotics students should find the competition accessible.

Participation is open to anyone, however, so expect some pros to enter.

By the way, did I mention that the winner of the contest will get a trip to Hawaii?!?! Register here: contest.theconstructsim.com

Good luck!

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.

Source: Jeff Kubina via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s an interesting robotics challenge – a coalition of blueberry farmers are offering a $250,000 prize for automation solutions that improve blueberry picking. The deadline for entries in the competition has been extended to December 4, 2015. Apparently farmers can’t keep up with the record high demand for blueberries.

Naturipe Farms are leading the Naturipe Challenge and offering $250,000 in prize incentives for new solutions, not to mention of course the benefits that for an agricultural robotics company of gaining early access to industry partners and customers. Today only frozen blueberries are harvested by machine, and so the challenge is to improve automation solutions for fresh blueberry harvesting.

“The majority of the blueberries are picked by hand at the peak of maturity and flavor,” said Robert Verloop, Executive Vice President of Marketing at Naturipe.  “However, the berries don’t ripen at the same time so we return to the same bush several times during the harvest season, which is both costly and a labor intensive process. There has been tremendous growth and interest in agricultural technology, robotics and sensory equipment to improve harvesting efficiencies, to manage costs and to reduce food waste.  We hope the ‘Naturipe Blue Challenge’ will help solve some of our on-the-farm challenges.” 

Main proposed operating specifications include: size/color sensing for detecting fruit maturity, careful handling to avoid any damage to the fruit, ability to directly fill field trays/baskets, 24/7 harvesting capability, average production of 500 Kg/day, mobility capabilities on uneven ground or dusty conditions, and fabrication costs per unit <$500,000 USD.

https://youtu.be/eDNXrzKQZDY

For more information or to submit an expression of interest, check out www.naturipechallenge.com.

Submit your video to the AAAI Video Competition for a chance to win one of the several Shakey Awards. We’ll be voting for the People’s Choice Award right here on Robohub. Last year’s videos were viewed over 1 million times!

Update: The submission deadline has been extended to October 23.

The AAAI Video Competition is now entering its tenth year and will be held in conjunction with the AAAI-16 conference in Phoenix, Arizona on February 12–17, 2016. Authors of award-winning videos will receive “Shakeys”, trophies named in honor of SRI’s Shakey robot and its pioneering video. Top videos will be screened at the award ceremony, during the conference, and online.

The goal of the competition is to show the world how much fun AI is by documenting exciting artificial intelligence advances in research, education, and application.

The rules are simple: Compose a short video about an exciting AI project, and narrate it so that it is accessible to a broad online audience. We strongly encourage student participation in the AAAI Video Competition! 

In addition to the People’s Choice Award, a panel of experts in AI will decide on awards for Best Video, Best Short Video, Best Student Video, Best Robot Video, and Most Entertaining Video.

For inspiration, you can view previous entries and award winners here, or watch last year’s videos on Youtube or Robohub. We’ve also added the award winning videos below.

Best Video

Best Student Video

People’s Choice Award

Torre del Sale, Piombino, was the location chosen for simulating the euRathlon’s Fukushima-like disaster. Photo Credit: euRathlon

Inspired by the 2011 Fukushima accident, the euRathlon competition is the first outdoor competition where teams of land, sea and air robots must cooperate in a realistic disaster-response scenario. Following participation in the trials and sub-challenges, six multi-domain teams attempted the Grand Challenge, where they were required to locate missing workers, map a building and identify critical hazards, and inspect land and underwater pipes and stem a leak, all within 100 minutes. Watch the Grand Challenge video recaps and find out the winning teams …

An example ‘Object of Potential Interest’, or OPI, the unblocked entrance was represented by a green rectangle. Photo credit: Joshua Davidson

ENSTA Bretagne Team 1 looking under water for a possible missing worker. Photo credit: euRathlon

The Grand Challenge

The seven partners of euRathlon consortium worked together for more than two years to design this unique disaster-response scenario, which comprised three realistic mission goals:

• Mission-A: Search for missing workers – Robots had to search for two missing workers represented by mannequins dressed in orange suits, which could be inside the building, outside the building, floating on the sea surface near the coast, or trapped underwater. Teams received bonus points if a worker was found during the first 30 minutes of the Grand Challenge, because in a real scenario the probability of finding a missing person alive decreases rapidly with time.
• Mission-B: Reconnaissance and environmental survey of a building – Robots had to inspect a building to evaluate damage (represented by markers) and find a safe path to a machine room where valves were located. This required robots to reconnoitre the area, create a map of the building and the outdoor area surrounding it, and locate there the objects of potential interest (OPIs) in order to provide situational awareness to the team.
• Mission-C: Pipe inspection and stemming a leak – Robots had to localise four pipe sections on land, localize another four matching pipes underwater, look for damage to the land pipes and identify a contaminant leak (represented by a marker), reach the valves in the machine room and underwater, and close the correct valves in a synchronised process.

Schematic representation of the distribution of piping sections and valves and their correspondence. Credit: euRathlon

Example of pipe distribution. Source: Google Maps.

The Grand Challenge was successfully met if all the three missions were accomplished within 100 minutes. Strategy was important, as teams were given significant leeway:

• Teams were free to tackle the mission goals in parallel or in sequence, and to choose the order.
• Teams were free to choose which types of robots to deploy, as well as how and when to deploy them.
• A team’s robots could communicate directly, or via their operators at the control station.

Taking place over two days, Grand Challenge was designed to encourage and reward cooperation between ground, marine and aerial robots, while allowing maximum flexibility in participation and innovation. Half of the teams were multi-domain partnerships and the other half full multi-domain teams.

Day One participants:

• Cobham (land) + Universitat de Girona (sea) + ISEP/INESC TEC (air)
• ENSTA Bretagne Team 1 (land, sea, air)
• ENSTA Bretagne Team 2 (land, sea, air)

Day Two participants:

• Bebot (land, air) + AUV Team TomKyle (sea)
• B.R.A.I.N Robots (land) + UNIFI (sea, air)
• ICARUS (land, sea, air)

Watch the video recaps:

The Award Ceremony

After the runs were complete, the judges retired to analyse the data provided by the teams throughout the competition and reach a verdict. The awards ceremony took place at the gardens of Giardini Pro Patria, Piombino.

Alan Winfield, euRathlon project coordinator, welcomed everyone and opened the ceremony. Then followed short speeches by Deputy Mayor Stefano Ferrini, and CMRE Deputy Director Andrew Pickup.

Gabriele Ferri, Director of euRathlon 2015, thanked René Garello, representative of the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, for their platinum sponsorship with a special focus on marine robotics. He also thanked the silver sponsors Enel, ECmanaged, Evologics, SBG-Systems and Texas Instruments, and Satoshi Tadokoro, IEEE RAS representative, for supporting the competition with the IEEE RAS Technical Committee (TC) on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR) special prizes for autonomy and multi-robot collaboration.

Winner of euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge: Team Cobham (Land)+Universitat de Girona (Sea) + INESP/INESC TEC (Air). Photo credit: euRathlon

euRathlon 2015 winners

Grand Challenge

• 1st prize: Cobham + Universitat de Girona + ISEP/INESC TEC
• 2nd equal: ICARUS
• 2nd equal: Bebot + AUV Team TomKyle
• 3rd prize: ENSTA Bretagne Team 1

Land + Air sub-challenge

• 1st prize: Cobham + ISEP/INESC TEC

Sea + Land sub-challenge

• 1st prize: Cobham + Universitat de Girona

Best euRathlon SSRR Autonomy Award, given by IEEE RAS TC on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics

• Winner: ICARUS
• Finalists: ICARUS, Universitat de Girona, ENSTA Bretagne Team 1

Best euRathlon MRS Multi-Robot Coordination Award, given by IEEE RAS TC on Multi-Robot Systems

• Winner: ICARUS
• Finalists: ICARUS, BeBot+AUV Team TomKyle, Universitat de Girona+Cobham

Texas Instruments Special Prizes for Innovation

• Winner (Land): Bebot
• Winner (Sea): Universitat de Girona
• Winner (Air): ICARUS

Marine Trials Prize (Students prize)

• 1st: Universitat de Girona
• 2nd: ENSTA Bretagne Team 1
• 3rd: AUGA

See you all at euRathlon 2017!

Group photo of euRathlon 2015 participants. Photo credit: euRathlon

DRC-HUBO robot from Team KAIST, winner of DARPA Robotics Challenge 2015, drops in for a visit on Day Four of eutRathlon 2015. Photo credit: euRathlon

Weather conditions challenged the teams participating on the second day of euRathlon 2015 two-domain sub-challenges. The morning started with the remaining team that had yet to participate in the land and air scenario (L+A). In the afternoon the strong wind made flying aerial robots difficulty, and to some extent, unsafe for spectators. As a result, the judges decided to cancel the sea and air (S+A) scenario scheduled for the afternoon, and allowed the land and sea robots to practise for the next day’s Grand Challenge. Find out the winners of the euRathlon 2015 sub-challenges …

Sub-Challenge (L+A): Survey the building and search for a missing worker

A minimum of one land robot and one aerial robot was required to participate in this scenario.

The robots had to perform a reconnaissance mission of the building and the land surrounding it. A schematic map of the building was given to the teams at the beginning of the sub-challenge. Entrances, corridors, rooms, and the machine room were shown on the map. However, it did not have detailed dimensions and the teams were told that it may or may not be up to date. Teams needed to be aware that an earthquake and tsunami had probably damaged part of the external and internal structure of the building, blocking some paths and entrances.

The team had to look for damage to the building, locate an unobstructed entrance, and at the same time find a safe path to the building and to the machine room for their land robot. Additionally, the robots had to find a missing worker (represented by a mannequin), who was located either inside or outside the building. If the worker was found during the first 30 minutes of the sub-challenge scenario, it improved the team’s chances of rescuing the worker alive.

Teams had 45 minutes to create a map of the interior of the building and its surroundings, and locate objects of potential interest, in this case blocked/unblocked entrances and corridors, damage, and the missing worker.

The multi-domain teams that participated in this second day of land and sea sub-challenges were:

• B.R.A.I.N. Robots (Land) + UNIFI (Sea & Air)
• ENSTA Bretagne Team 1 (Land, Sea & Air)
• ICARUS

One of ICARUS team’s multirotor (ICARUS EU-FP7 project). Photo credit: euRathlon

Caption: One of ICARUS team’s multirotor (ICARUS EU-FP7 project). Photo Credits: euRathlon

Sub-Challenge (S+A): Pipe inspection and search for a worker

A minimum of one marine robot and one aerial robot was required to participate in this scenario. Ground robots were not allowed in this sub-challenge.

In this scenario aerial robots had to inspect and map the beach area surrounding the building, and sea robots had to inspect and map the Enel-harbour area. They had to search for damage and leaks in the four pipe sections on land and the four pipe sections underwater, represented by different markers. The piping sections consisted of cylindrical yellow shapes on land and underwater, and each of the pipes on land was logically connected to one underwater (and vice-versa).

Robots also had to look for a missing worker represented by a mannequin dressed in bright orange. The worker could be located on the land outside the building or at the sea (at the surface near the shore or trapped underwater) in a supine or prone position.

Schematic representation of the piping structures for the Sea & Air Sub-Challenge. Credit: euRathlon

This scenario was cancelled due to poor weather conditions that could compromise safety for the aerial robots.

WALK-MAN and DRC-HUBO humanoid robots exhibition

A large audience of people of different ages came to Tor del Sale, Piombino, to see the exhibition of WALK-MAN and DRC-HUBO robots. These two humanoid robots participated recently in the DARPA Robotics Challenge in Los Angeles (USA). This was the first time they did a demonstration together in Europe. WALK-MAN is the robot developed by the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) and the Research Centre “E. Piaggio” from Pisa as part of an EU-FP7 project with the same name. DRC-HUBO, the winner of the DARPA Robotics Challenge 2015, is developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) is a competition of robot systems and software teams with the aim to develop robots capable of assisting humans in responding to natural and man-made disasters. Team KAIST and Team WALK-MAN showed how their robots walked, close a gate valve and could go up and down steps.

WALK-MAN robot closing a valve during the exhibition. Photo credit: euRathlon

Winners of euRathlon 2015 Two Domain Sub-Challenges

The winners of euRathlon 2015 two-domain sub-challenges were:

• Sub-Challenge (Land +Air) : Survey the building and search for a missing worker:
  – 1^st Cobham (Land)+ ISEP/INESC (Air)
  – 2^nd ICARUS (Land, Sea & Air)

• Sub-Challenge (Land & Sea) : Stem the leak:
  – 1^st Cobham (Land)+ Universitat de Girona (Sea)
  – 2^nd ICARUS (Land, Sea & Air)
  – 3^rd AUV Team TomKyle (Sea) + Bebot (Land, Air)
  – 4^th UNIFI (Air & Sea) + B.R.A.I.M. Robots (Land)

• Sub-Challenge (Sea + Air): Pipe inspection and search for a worker:
  Cancelled

Don’t miss tomorrow Day Five recap, the Grand Challenge starts!

 Missed coverage of some of the earlier challenges? Find it here.  

Robot Monique (B.R.A.I.N Robots) and the Enel Power Plant in Tor del Sale, Piombino. Photo Credits: Klemen Istenic

The first day of euRathlon 2015 two-domain sub-challenges started with the land and air (L+A) combined scenario, followed in the afternoon by the sea and land (S+L), where robots had to search for missing workers and leaks, inspect the building and close valves on land and underwater. Only ten teams passed to this second round of the competition, creating a total of 6 multi-domain teams — find out the winners of these trials and watch the video recap …

The Sub-Challenges

In euRathlon competition, the sub-challenges are referred to as the combined scenarios. They are two-domain scenarios, each a combination of two trials.

There are a total of three sub-challenges: land and sea (L+S), sea and air (S+A) and land and air (L+A). In the sub-challenges the main goal is cooperation between the two domains. Cooperation and autonomy are rewarded through the scoring schema.

Sub-Challenge (L+A): Survey the building and search for a missing worker

A minimum of one land robot and one aerial robot was required to participate in this scenario.

The robots had to perform a reconnaissance mission of the building and the land surrounding it. A schematic map of the building was given to the teams at the beginning of the sub-Challenge. Entrances, corridors, rooms, and the machine room were shown on the map. However, it did not have detailed dimensions and the teams were told that it may or may not be up to date. Teams needed to be aware that an earthquake and tsunami had probably damaged part of the external and internal structure of the building, blocking some paths and entrances.

The team had to look for damage to the building, locate an unobstructed entrance, and at the same time find a safe path to the building and to the machine room for their land robot. Additionally, the robots had to find a missing worker (represented by a mannequin), who was located either inside or outside the building. If the worker was found during the first 30 minutes of the sub-challenge scenario, it improved the team’s chances of rescuing the worker alive.

Teams had 45 minutes to create a map of the interior of the building and its surroundings, and locate objects of potential interest, in this case blocked/unblocked entrances and corridors, damage, and the missing worker.

Of the total of 6 multi-domain teams, only three teams participated in this first day of land and sea sub-challenges. The teams were:

• AUV Tomkyle (Sea) + Bebot (Land & Air)
• Cobham (Land) + Universitat de Girona (Sea) + ISEP/INESC (Air)
• ENSTA Bretagne Team 2 (Land, Sea & Air)

The rest of teams were scheduled for the next day.

Air Team UNIFI (University of Florence) partners with land team B.R.A.I.N Robots. Photo Credits: euRathlon

Sub-Challenge (L+S): Stem the leak

A minimum of one land robot and one marine robot was required to participate in this scenario. Aerial robots were not allowed in this sub-challenge.

Land and sea robots started from the premise that they had already reached the building and the pipes area underwater, respectively. The main tasks were to find the leaking pipes and close the correct valves underwater and on land to stop the leak. Special care had to be taken, as closing an incorrect valve could cause a reduction of the amount of water provided for cooling the reactor in the scenario, causing the team to incur a penalty.

Land and marine robots had to cooperate to map the area and discover the correct valves. Once the leak on land was found the ground robot had to communicate the number of that pipe to the sea robot, so that it could follow that pipe underwater and close the corresponding valve. In the case of the marine robot, it had to communicate the number of the leaking underwater pipe to the land robot so that it could close the corresponding valve. A schematic of the connections was given to the teams. The robots could not close the valves until the two correct pair were found, as the process of closing them had to be synchronised.

Schematic representation of the distribution of piping sections and valves and their correspondence for Sub-Challenge L+S. Photo credits: euRathlon

In this sub-challenge, it was known that the pipes on land close to the shore were not damaged or leaking, so no inspection of them by the land robots was required.

Only four multi-domain teams decided to participate in this L+S sub-challenge. They were:

• AUV TomKyle (Sea) +Bebot (Land & Air)
• Cobham (Land)+Universitat de Girona (Sea)+ISEP/INESC (Air)
• ICARUS (Land, Sea & Air)
• B.R.A.I.N. Robots (Land )+ UNIFI (Sea & Air)

Team Universitat de Girona (partner in this sub-challenge with Cobham) closing the valve underwater. Photo credits: euRathlon

Robot-era project exhibition

A big crowd of people attended the robotics exhibition of Robot-Era project (Scuola Sant’Anna di Pisa) at Piazza Bovio, in the main square of Piombino city. Robot-Era is an EU-funded project that focuses on the development, implementation and demonstration of feasibility of robots for assisted living. One of it aims is to improve the quality of life and efficiency of care for the elderly people.

: The three assistance living robots of Robot-Era project ready to welcome the public. Photo credits: euRathlon

Winners of euRathlon 2015 Trials (A2, S2, L2).

The winners of the second euRathlon 2015 trials were:

• Land Trial (L2): Mobile manipulation (valve closing):
  – 1^st Cobham
  – shared 2^nd ICARUS / Bebot
  – 4^th SARRUS
  – 5^th ENSTA Bretagne Team 1

• Sea Trial (S2): Leak localisation and valve closing:
  – 1^st Universitat de Girona
  – 2^nd ENSTA Bretagne Team 1
  – 3^rd AUGA
  – shared 4^th OUBOT / AUV Team TomKyle

• Air Trial (A2): Aerial reconnaissance inside a building:
  – 1^st ENSTA Bretagne Team 1
  – 2^nd ENSTA Bretagne Team 2 

Don’t miss tomorrow Day Four recap of the second set of sub-challenges and the exhibition of the DRC-HUBO KAIST and WALK-MAN Humanoid robots!

Missed coverage of some of the earlier challenges? Find it here.  

Sea scenarios take place in the harbour of the Enel power plant, Piombino, Italy. Image: euRathlon

Inspired by the 2011 Fukushima accident, euRathlon is a civilian outdoor robotics competition focused on realistic cooperative disaster response scenarios. On the second day of single-domain trials, the land, sea and air robots faced three new challenges. Sea robots had to search for a leak and close a valve, while land robots had to inspect the inside of the building and close the valves in the machine room. Aerial robots had to inspect the building and look for a safe path to the machine room for a land robot. The winners of the first euRathlon 2015 trials were unveiled and a series of robotics talks took place at Piombino Castle.

Watch the Day Two recap video here:

Sea Trial (S2): Leak localisation and valve closing

In this second trial, the marine robots had to localise a leaking underwater pipe and close the valve associated to it. The leak was represented by a plume of orange buoys and an orange rectangular marker on one of the four yellow pipes. Once the leaking pipe was found, the robot had to follow it to reach the underwater structure where the valve was mounted. Finally, the robot had to close the valve to stop the hypothetical leak.

As in previous days, the teams had to work under poor water visibility conditions, making it harder to find the leak and close the valve. Teams were only allowed to tele-operate their AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) for closing the valve.

Eleven teams participated in this sea trial, competing in parallel in two different areas. The teams were AUV Team TomKyle, Robdos Team , ENSTA Bretagne Team 1, ENSTA Bretagne Team 2, Team Nessie, Universitat de Girona , AUGA, AVORA, UNIFI, ICARUS and OUBOT.

AUV Team Tomkyle (University of Applied Sciences Kiel) preparing for the second sea trial. Photo credits: euRathlon

Land Trial (L2): Mobile Manipulation (valves closing)

In the mobile manipulation land trial, the robots had to reach the machine room inside the building. Inside the machine room there were 4 valves, a canister containing water that simulated contaminated material and a barrel. The land robots had to close a minimum of one valve. They were also required to pick up the canister containing the “hazardous” substance, move it into the barrel, and then cover the barrel with a lid.

The seven teams that participated in this trial were Bebot, B.R.A.I.N. Robots, ENSTA Bretagne Team 1, ENSTA Bretagne Team 2, Cobham, ICARUS and SARRUS.

Team Bebot (Bern University of Applied Sciences) setting things up before starting the second land trial . Image: euRathlon

Air Trial (A2): Aerial reconnaissance inside a building

In the second air trial, aerial robots performed a reconnaissance mission of the building in order to increase the situational awareness of the emergency response team. For this purpose, the robots had to enter the building and find a safe path to the machine room for a land robot. The UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) had to create a map and localise objects of potential interest (OPIs) that marked obstacles and blocked paths that would limit access for a ground robot.

Due to the complexity of flying inside a building (which also limits the size of the UAV), only three teams participated: ENSTA Bretagne Team 1, ENSTA Bretagne Team 2 and ICARUS. This last team opted for inspecting the inside of the building through the windows using a thermal camera.

ENSTA Bretagne Team 2 performing the aerial reconnaissance inside the building. Image: euRathlon

Robotics talks

As part of euRathlon 2015, a series of robotics talks took place in the evening at Piombino Castle. On Sunday, Prof Alan Winfield (UWE Bristol, Bristol Robotics Laboratory), Dr Anne Bajart (EU Commission Project Officer) and Dr Gabriele Ferri (CMRE) presented the euRathlon project to the audience. This introduction was followed by a talk on robotics for underwater archaeology by archaeologist Pamela Gambogi (Soprintendenza dei Beni Archeologici della Toscana) and Prof Andrea Caiti (ISME, University of Pisa). Monday’s talks also featured another group of exceptional speakers: Prof Paolo Dario (Scuola Sant’Anna of Pisa) presented the Robot-Era project and the Biorobotics Institute and Dr Nikos Tsagaraskis (IIT, Genova) talked about the WALK-MAN project and their experience participating in the DARPA Robotics Challenge with their humanoid robot.

Prof Paolo Dario (Scuola Sant’Anna of Pisa) presenting on the Biorobotics Institute. Image: euRathlon

Winners of euRathlon 2015 Trials (A1, S1, L1)

The winners of the first euRathlon 2015 trials were:

• Land Trial (L1): Reconnaissance in urban structure. Shared 1st place – Bebot / Cobham, 3rd – SARRUS

• Sea Trial (S1): Navigation and environmental survey. 1st – Universitat de Girona, 2nd – ENSTA Bretagne Team 1, 3rd – AUGA, 4th – ICARUS, 5th – AUV Team TomKyle

• Air Trial (A1): Aerial detection and mapping. 1st – ICARUS, 2nd – ISEP/INESC TEC, shared 3rd – ENSTA Bretagne Team 1 / ENSTA Bretagne Team 2

Don’t miss tomorrow’s Day Three recap for the results of the second day of trials and the start of the two-domain Sub-Challenges!

Missed coverage of some of the earlier challenges? Find it here.  

[Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly noted the order of the Sea Trial Winners.]

ArtiMinds is redefining how we program robots with their intuitive and semi-automatic interface for controlling complex industrial robot tasks , including sensor-adaptive motions. (Germany)

Blue Frog Robotics is the company behind the open-source BUDDY companion robot , whose crowdfunding campaign recently ended with over 6 times their original funding ask. (France)

https://youtu.be/51yGC3iytbY

CleverPet has built a smart dog feeder that lets you play, teach, and connect with your pet all day. (USA)

Erle Robotics creates artificial brains for robots and drones that run on Linux and are based on ROS. (Spain)

GaitTronics is helping patients recover more quickly and with their rehabilitative robot walker , which makes early mobility therapy safe and secure for both patients and caregivers. (Canada)

Mimetics is the company behind the Jade, a fully-developed educational robot designed to engage and excite the next generation of scientists and engineers. (Canada)

Luvozo is developing SAM, a robot-based concierge for senior living communities to supplement staff with non-medical tasks and activities. (USA)

https://youtu.be/7b3dVHYzeR4

Mecademic has built an exceptionally compact and accurate tabletop collaborative robot arm for education and research. (Canada)

https://youtu.be/aKMpMYWniA8

Mobotech is the company behind the Mobot, a light and compact all-electric smart forklift for maneuvering in tight places and preventing workplace injuries. (New Zealand)

https://youtu.be/KSPOKlBv9a4?list=UUCMzA9Kphlgs1jeqH_weRDA

MUSE Robotics enables developers to build custom robots with less time and money using their complete package of plug and play actuators, motor control and sensory modules . (formerly SkyRobotics of Greece; USA)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sXlsH6PaNg

Redtree Hydra lets developers easily connect sensors, actuators, components and other parts to the robot without all the hassle of complicated circuits, specialized hardware or device drivers. (Canada)

Scannable are reinventing LiDAR so that low cost ground and aerial vehicles can avoid obstacles and create precise maps . (USA)

https://youtu.be/y3HL0IcbfPk

The Construct lets developers run simulations in the cloud and share them with colleagues via web interface. (Spain/USA)

Zyro Robot Therapy System is building a personalized robot coach that addresses a variety of educational, social and therapeutic needs. (USA)

PLUS a stealth female-led startup (USA) that we will share with you after the finals!! TBA!!

***

“These are all high quality early stage robotics startups, and that’s about all they have in common!” says competition organizer Andra Keay (Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics). “They address all areas of robotics … This an incredibly positive signal for investors and the robotics industry as a whole.”

The finalists will pitch to an audience of investors and robotics entrepreneurs on September 18 at WilmerHale in Palo Alto, CA. The winners will receive around $100,000 in prizes and services tailored specifically for robotics companies, from sponsors that include CSIRO, Siemens, Amazon, WilmerHale, SMBC, iRobot and Robolution Capital.

Judges include Shahin Farshschi (Lux Capital), Rich Mahoney (SRI International), Peter Kambouris (CSIRO), Glenn Luinenburg (WilmerHale), Hanns Anders (iRobot) and Carolin Funk (Siemens).

Providing global reach to local tech clusters

The Robot Launch global startup competition is co-organized by Silicon Valley Robotics, a regional robotics cluster, and Robohub.org, a global robotics research and community news network. Both are not-for-profit organizations supporting innovation in robotics, and together they form a strong bridge between robotics innovation and entrepreneurship.

“Silicon Valley is ideally positioned to connect robotics startups to investors, and the global robotics research community is producing some exciting new business ideas. But while there is now more money flowing towards early stage startups, robotics and hardware entrepreneurs need to be incredibly focused in how they move from prototype to beta customer and business model,” says Keay.

“Robot Launch connects clusters of robotics innovation at the critical early seed stage, and showcases the best new robotics businesses from around the world.”

Meaningful prizes for robotics startups

Robot Launch prizes are geared toward providing real business acceleration for the winners, such as:

A series of regional awards for best US, Canadian, Australian and European startups are geared toward developing local partnerships between tech clusters and mentors who can provide regional business, legal or investment support. For example, the law firms WilmerHale and LaBarge Weinstein will provide the regional US and Canadian winners (respectively) with free legal startup services; the regional Australian winner will get business mentoring from QUTBluebox ; and Robolution Capital will provide pitch coaching to the best European startup. Awards such as these help get more robotics startups onto the global stage while supporting entrepreneurship locally.

Siemens is offering the winning industrial robotics startups membership into their new Frontier Program, which includes access to Siemens’ PLM software suite and mentorship with industrial manufacturing partner companies. Robotics is a new area in the Frontier Program, which was initially only for 3D printing startups. The first robotics startup in the Frontier Program was Clearpath Robotics (Canada), who is also an award sponsor in the Robot Launch competition. Learn more.

Clearpath Robotics  is sponsoring the Robot Launch ROS Award to the startup best using the Robot Operating System. The availability of the open source Robot Operating System ROS has played an important role in speeding up the growth of startups (including Clearpath Robotics), and more than 1/3rd of the Robot Launch startups use ROS in some way. Clearpath will be providing 10 hours of ROS consulting to the winner.

The Olander Company and KRTKL are also providing custom hardware for robotics startups in the finals of Robot Launch, showcasing how even early-stage robotics companies can help each other get to market faster.

The Robohub Readers Pick award celebrates the crowd favorite through online voting. Now that crowdfunding can play a significant role in the pathway for many startups, success in attracting votes here sends a strong signal of support to CEOs and potential investors.

Key Info

The finals will take place online and in person on September 18, 2015 at WilmerHale in Palo Alto, CA. Videos from the event will be available on Robohub, data and time TBA. See Twitter hashtag  #RobotLaunch2015 for details.

***

About Silicon Valley Robotics

Silicon Valley Robotics (SVR) is the not-for-profit organization supporting innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies in Silicon Valley. SVR organizes investor and startup events, networking and a job board for robotics companies, and strategic reports on the robotics ecosystem.

http://svrobo.org

About Robohub

Robohub is a non-profit online communication network for the international robotics community. With over 70K unique visitors each month, Robohub features news and opinion from experts in all facets of robotics, including research, ethics, law, start-ups, business, arts and education.

http://robohub.org/

Follow Robot Launch on Twitter  

#RobotLaunch2015 https://twitter.com/hashtag/RobotLaunch2015

@svrobo https://twitter.com/svrobo

@Robohub https://twitter.com/robohub

Established in Berlin in 1847, and with a presence in Silicon Valley since the 1950s, Siemens invests more than $1B in the US each year for research and development. Now their Technology to Business team (TTB) has launched the Frontier Partner program, which aims to give startups in robotics and 3D printing a head start by providing them with software and resources to accelerate the development and manufacturing of their products. We spoke with Director of Strategy for Siemens PLM Software, Andy Swiecki, about why Siemens is focusing on robotics right now, and what startups can expect to get out of the Frontiers program.

[AK] Hi Andy, could you introduce yourself and tell us about Siemens Frontier Program? 

[AS] Hi my name is Andy Swiecki, I’m with Siemens PLM Software. I’m part of our strategy division and I work with a lot of our third party software and technology partners. One of the programs I work with is the Frontier Program, which is set up to support startup companies working in technology areas that are of interest to Siemens.

Two of the initial technology areas are additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, and robotics. We rolled out the Frontier Program at the end of 2014. We have a fair number of 3D printing companies that are part of the program – startup companies that are looking at new innovative technologies – and we’ve recently expanded it to include robotics. We are looking forward to getting more companies that are in the startup stage to join the program and work with Siemens technologies as they develop their company and their technologies.

Siemens has been looking at startup innovation for more than 15 years with the TTB program. What is the driving motivation to look at robotics, and what sort of robotics are you looking at?

Siemens is a large global company. I’m with the Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Division; we develop software that supports companies that are developing products and developing manufacturing processes. Siemens Technology to Business, or TTB, is another organization within Siemens, and we’re collaborating together on the Frontier Program.

Siemens Technology To Business focuses on supporting startups and startup technology areas, innovation, and understanding how that innovation relates to Siemens.

Siemens has as long history in manufacturing technologies, in manufacturing automation technologies, and in lots of areas in the field of robotics. We’re looking forward to working with startups, and working with new innovations in robotics, to understand our own technology better, and to understand new technologies that are being developed.

Siemens is sponsoring the 2015 Robot Launch “Industrial Robotics Award”, offering the winners developer licenses for a broad range of Siemens’ product lifecycle management (PLM) software, access to its technology partner program, and other development resources valued at over $150K.

What advantages will startups gain working with Siemens in the Frontier Program?

Startups can really focus on rapid product development that’s enabled by developing on top of the Siemens PLM Software components and platform technologies. The access to the partner ecosystem and the extensive market reach to the installed base of Siemens PLM Software users help them to accelerate the go-to-market.

Through the collaboration with Siemens Technology To Business and Siemens PLM Software, they’ll be able to take advantage of some of the expertise in each of the organizations. Siemens PLM Software has a platform of software technologies that are being made available to the startups through the program, so one of the advantages is access to that technology.

They’ll also be members of the formal Siemens PLM Software Solution Partner Program, so they’ll get the benefit of that program along with the ability to collaborate with other members of that program – people developing technologies at different stages of their company lifecycles.

And they’ll be able to work with Siemens Technology To Business and the startup and innovation programs that Siemens TTB has.

So as well as gaining access to Siemens technology, you’re gaining access to a whole network of business expertise, mentorship and the partnerships that Siemens is developing?

Exactly. Through Siemens TTB there are a great deal of mentorship possibilities, and through the Siemens PLM Solution Program there are hundreds of software and technology partners that are part of the program and available for networking and consultation.

What are some of the companies that have joined Siemens Frontier Program to date?

The initial roll out of the program was in the area of additive manufacturing. Authentise is one example of the kind of company that has joined the program. They are innovating in the area of 3D printing. We’ve had some joint activities with them and have talked about the technologies they’re developing in a fair amount of detail.

Since we began rolling out into the field of robotics, we’ve had a number of interested companies, and one that we’ve already begun working with is Clearpath Robotics. They are looking at the Siemens PLM platform as one of the ways to expand their products.

How do robotics startups go about accessing the Siemens Frontier Program?

There’s an application on the Siemens Technology To Business website. If you go to www.ttb.siemens.com/frontier you can it, as well as a description of the program. You can also find a link to the Frontier Program on the Siemens PLM Partner area.

If you apply you’ll be contacted by people within Siemens so that we can better understand what you’re doing, and your application will be reviewed by a technology team. From there, if your interests align with Siemens’ interests, then we can start working together.

It’s great that Siemens is offering a prize in the Robot Launch competition. What do you think about the startups that have entered?

Of course! We’re looking forward to participating in the competition, and to offering a prize, which is a membership in the Frontier Program. Siemens TTB will be directly involved in looking at all the startups and we’re looking forward to being part of it!

Is there anything you’d like to say in conclusion?

We are excited to work in these new areas, and we are excited to work with the robotics community. We’re looking forward to seeing what new technologies innovative startups have and to sharing the technologies that Siemens PLM Software has.

https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/about_us/newsroom/press/press_release.cfm?Component=238716&ComponentTemplate=822

Transcript below.

In this interview, Audrow Nash talks to two teams from Mobile Microrobotics Challenge at the 2015 International Conference for Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

The first team was from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. We spoke with Leanne King about the Autonomous Mobility & Accuracy Challenge. In this competition, teams try to move a small robot accurately around a shape. The robot can be a small piece of metal or even a bubble generated by a laser. Leanne’s team won the Mobility & Accuracy Challenge.

The second team was from West University of Timișoara (UVT) in Romania. We spoke to Ioan Alexandru Ivan about the Microassembly Challenge, where teams tried to move small triangles against walls and other fixtures using a micro-robot. The Ivan’s team placed second in the Microassembly Challenge.

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Transcript:

Microrobotics Mobility and Accuracy Challenge: Interview 1

Audrow Nash:  I’m at ICRA at the …

Edward Nerad:  … Mobile Microrobotics Challenge.

Audrow Nash:  And I am speaking to a team from …

Leanne King:  … University of Hawaii, Manoa.

Audrow Nash:  Would you introduce yourself?

Leanne King:  My name is Leanne, I’m a senior Electrical Engineering student at Manoa. I’m joined by Edward and Caralyn. Edward just graduated and Caralyn is also is a senior.

Audrow Nash:  Would you tell me a bit about the Challenge, the Mobility Challenge?

Leanne King:  The Mobility Challenge was where you had to autonomously traverse three different shapes: a rectangle a triangle and a circle as quickly and accurately as possible. Teams were judged based on time, how big a robot you had and accuracy; how many landmarks you hit on the field.

Audrow Nash:  First, what are these robots?

Leanne King:  Microrobotics could be anything really. Most teams use magnetic dust and electromagnetics to control it. Our team uses bubbles. We generate our bubbles using lasers.

Audrow Nash:  You generate the bubble using a laser?

Leanne King:  Yes.

Audrow Nash:  How does that work?

Leanne King: When you heat oil to a certain point, it creates differences in the surface tension. The thermal changes create surface tension in certain areas at the laser point that then generates a bubble.

Audrow Nash:  Differences in surface tension?

Leanne King:  Yeah, so then we can control that bubble using the same principle. The bubble wants to go to the laser.

Audrow Nash: Changing the surface tension of the area around it moves the bubble?

Leanne King:  Yes.

Audrow Nash:  Interesting. And so you direct the laser around these shapes and that’s how you control where the bubble goes for these challenges?

Leanne King:  Yes, we pick certain points, like critical points. For example, a triangle has three vertices, we pick those three points and then the computer finds a solution for those lines and the laser just steps through them.

Audrow Nash: Is there a vision system? How are you looking at what this bubble does?

Leanne King:  We have a camera looking thorough a microscope objective lens and that’s really it. We connected it to a computer and that’s how you see …

Audrow Nash:  And you select the points manually, where you want it to go?

Leanne King:  Yes, we pick our points. We were working on a visual system, using a camera, but it’s a little less reliable because our fields get dirty. So we decided to do it manually.

Audrow Nash:  What are some of the major challenges with this?

Leanne King:  Of our personal major challenges, our laser strength is very critical. If we don’t have a strong enough laser, or enough of a focused laser, the bubble won’t generate or we won’t be able to move it efficiently. The scale of the competition, because it’s on a micro scale …

Audrow Nash:  Can you relate the scale to something?

Leanne King:  Hair.

Audrow Nash:  Like, is it 100^th of the thickness of a hair?

Leanne King:  It’s like the thickness of a hair.

Audrow Nash:  The thickness of a hair.

Leanne King:  Yeah, the robots can be no bigger than 500 micrometers, and fields, I think, are three centimeters long. The entire course is 3 centimeters. It’s pretty small.

Audrow Nash:  What are some future applications of this kind of research?

Leanne King:  We’ve been doing some research into what this can be used for. Right now this is kind of a proof of concept thing that we can do something so small and move objects around with other small objects. Some research is already being done in the medical field where you can move particles in packets of medicine through a body with micro-robots. That will give us better precision and quicker recovery time or healing processes, and things like that. It has a lot of medical applications so far.

Audrow Nash:  Are there applications outside of the medical field?

Leanne King:  If you were able to create a system that can be put onto, for example, the BP oil spill, it can move those micro-particles and clean up the spill without humans needing to be in the water. If you move the micro-particles quickly, it will be able to clean it a little bit more efficiently.

Audrow Nash:  How do you feel about the competition so far?

Leanne King:  We’re enjoying it, we’re enjoying ourselves. Yesterday we did very well in the autonomous portion of the contest; we were one of only two teams to complete the challenge. That secures us first or second place, depending on how well we did compared to the other team. Today, we had some problems moving triangles in the mobility challenge, but we know what happened, what went wrong and how to fix it. So we’ll be back next year.

Audrow Nash:  Thank you.

Leanne King:  No, thank you.

Microrobotics Assembly Challenge: Interview 2

Audrow Nash: Would you tell me who you are?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: I’m Alex Ioan, I’m an assistant professor at the University of Timișoara, which is located next to the capital city of Bucharest, Romania.

Audrow Nash: Would you tell me a bit about the Microassembly Challenge?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: The Microassembly Challenge consists of pushing very small triangular objects, roughly the size of a human hair, into a very narrow channel of less than a millimeter in diameter. To be precise, it’s 750 microns, 0.75 of a millimeter. The winning team is the one that can insert the most triangular objects into this channel in two minutes.

There are several actuation principles involved, namely electromagnetics – these microrobotic devices are not tethered. This means that you cannot wire them; they should be operated wirelessly.

Audrow Nash: Yes, and so you control them with magnetic forces?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yeah, with magnetic forces.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me a bit about your setup that uses magnetic forces?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: We use a set of four coils as you can see here. We have an arena, in the middle region, and inside we have the microrobotic agent that is a neodymium micro magnet of around 220 micrometers, each side.

Audrow Nash: What I’m looking at is a series of… there are four coils here?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yeah.

Audrow Nash: And the coils, their cylinders in the top part are facing the neodymium magnet, correct? That’s in the center of all four coils, it kind of looks like a plus sign.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Well, we will generate magnetic gradient and this will attract the neodymium orient and the neodymium magnet towards the magnetic gradient field. So, with a joystick, we are able to drive these four coils and have very smooth movement.

Audrow Nash:  What does the neodymium magnet do?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  The neodymium magnet is the magnetic agent. It will respond to the magnetic field generated by the coils.

Audrow Nash:  So, the neodymium magnet – is that what you’re moving?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  Yes.

Audrow Nash:  The coils that are in the plus shape, you put a current through them and this generates a magnetic field that moves the neodymium magnet – that’s the small microrobot that you’re moving. And it’s moving on a X-Y plane.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  Exactly, X-Y and rotation.

Audrow Nash:  And rotation.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  And rotation: X-Y-R. They’re also doing 5D [indicating another group] so they also do Z, they have a much more complex setup.

Audrow Nash:  So one of the groups behind us does depth as well.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  Yeah, definitely you should ask them questions. However, we focused on integration, as you can see we have an all-inclusive device, all integrated.

Audrow Nash:  Yes, it’s very small.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  We have the smallest of the most compact ones and it’s very low cost. It’s based on open source technology. Here, you can see the Raspberry Pi …

Audrow Nash:  So you have a Raspberry Pi with a touch screen?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  Yeah, we developed a sort of shield for this one. We would like, eventually, to advertise it on Kickstarter or something like that.

Audrow Nash:  That would be cool.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  So we intend to further develop this product. It can help a lot for teaching, for instance. You can teach actuation principles, you can teach image processing, you can teach control systems.

Audrow Nash: It’s a nice little package for it.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yes.

Audrow Nash: I agree. So, going back to the competition, you’re moving this neodymium magnet and it is pushing around these little triangles to try to put them together or put them against the wall. How did the competition go?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Quite well. Many competing teams were able to insert triangles and we also managed several. Right now, we’re having a small issue with one of the rules because they …

Audrow Nash: If the triangles go on to the borders.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  If it goes out of bounds. In bounds, the ruling is a little bit fuzzy.

Audrow Nash:  It’s not clear, I see.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  But we still managed to insert around five or six triangles in the two- minute window.

Audrow Nash:  And so, what are some of the applications of this technology?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  Well, the main application could be biomedical. For instance, this type of task simulates pushing objects or medicine, drugs, into blood vessels or noninvasive surgery. One day, robotic agents with some cancer treatment drugs will be driven through the body to the tumor, and they will locally deliver chemo static medicines. I think this field will really grow; microrobotics develops more and more as the technology advances towards nanotechnology, micro-technology. This has huge potential for the future.

Audrow Nash:  What about microassembly, actually building very small robots or something else, does this technology encompass that as well?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: Yeah, you can build things.

Audrow Nash:  What can we do with these small things?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan: We could build 3D micro systems, 3D MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems), besides the medical applications. Presently, MEMS are based on planar technology but, in the future, for further integration, some parts of the MEMS could be assembled in 3D to build, for instance, more integrated actuators, more lab-on-a-chip integrated devices that are not possible today. This could also be a way forward for more integrated applications.

Audrow Nash:  Would this be similar to how they are now layering transistors for more space, rather than just moving along one plane?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  Yeah, I’m not entirely familiar with that technology.

Audrow Nash:  But that doesn’t require microrobots.

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  Well, I don’t know. Probably one day we’ll have extremely small devices based on this technology. They could be, for instance, taken by microrobotic manipulators and placed inside very small systems. The idea is to embed intelligence but we’re quite far from that stage.

Audrow Nash:  Well, not actually intelligence within the robot but in how you control it, with an external magnetic field or a laser for example, correct?

Ioan Alexandru Ivan:  Yeah, for the moment we cannot embed intelligence in a tiny robot under a millimeter. But these incremental steps will help, in the future, to develop such systems. It’s groundwork for future applications. The more we integrate, the more we are able to manipulate accurately and this will allow us to make the next generation of robots more integrated and more intelligent.

Audrow Nash:  Thank you.

RoCKIn@home (left) and RoCKIn@work (right). Source: RoCKIn

Over the last 20 years, robot competitions have emerged as a powerful means to foster progress in robotics research and development (R&D). RoCKIn is part a of new generation of scientific robotics competitions that were launched out of the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme.

By combining the scientific rigor and repeatability of experiments with the real-world relevance and spectacle of competitive events, robot competitions are able to offer a highly complementary approach to traditional lab-based R&D. Through competition events and the development of a robust benchmarking methodology, RoCKIn aims to further innovation in the field of industrial and domestic robotics. From the 21-23 November, we will be holding our second and major competition event in Lisbon, Portugal.

Here, within purpose-built domestic and industrial arenas, teams from around the world will compete in tasks designed to be highly relevant to the real-world challenges, all in front of a live audience. For the teams, the event gives them an opportunity to network, share tips and tricks with their peers, learn from seasoned robotics experts, and gain key insights into the strengths and weaknesses of their robotic systems. There are two ‘Challenges’ or streams in which teams can compete in – RoCKIn@Home or RoCKIn@Work.

RoCKIn@Home

This Challenge focuses on assisting the elderly or impaired and is set within the apartment of Granny Annie – an elderly lady who needs some support to keep her healthy, active and safe. Robots are benchmarked on three tasks and three specific functionalities. The tasks include interacting appropriately with known and unknown visitors to the apartment, and helping Granny Annie with everyday actions such as opening and closing the window blinds. These require the robot to correctly understand a set of predefined and recognisable commands, work interactively with other devices (such as security cameras and remotely controllable lights and blinds) and navigate the arena without colliding into anything. The three specific functionalities being tested include how accurately the robots perceive objects.

RoCKIn@Work

This Challenge looks for innovative industrial robots that can help businesses meet increasing demand from their customers. Once again, robots will be benchmarked on three tasks and three functionalities. Set in the RoCKIn & RoLLIn factory, a robot will assist with the assembly of a drive axel – this a component of the robot itself and therefore a step towards self-replicating robots. Tasks include locating, transporting and assembling necessary parts, checking their quality and prepping them for other machines and workers. Ultimately, the robots will be working interactively as personal mobile assistants in a highly flexible and continuously changing production line.

In both Challenges, data is taken directly from the robots and compared with ground truth data captured from specialized infrared cameras set up around the arena that, through marker sets attached to the robots, can accurately determine their true movements within the arena. This data is used not only for evaluation purposes but also allows teams to get detailed feedback on their performance and isolates the areas they need to improve. It also aims to provide the international robotics community with rich datasets and metrics for task and functionality benchmarking.

RoCKIn2015 is open free-of-charge to the public, who will get to see the state-of-the-art robots autonomously perform these challenging tasks. The competition will be held in the ‘Portugal Pavilion’ and Lisbon’s premier science museum – ‘The Pavilion of Knowledge’. The Portugal Pavilion will host the RoCKIn@Home and RoCKIn@Work arenas, where the competition activities and demonstrations will take place. The opening and closing ceremonies, along with various satellite events throughout the three days, will be held in The Pavilion of Knowledge. Both are situated within Parque das Nações, in Lisbon.

The event is currently accepting applications and is open to new teams, as well as seasoned ‘RoCKIans’. Vistors, make sure you save the date and join RoCKIn for the final showdown in November to see what the future could have in store for all of us.

Key dates

Deadline for Applications: 31 August 2015

Decision on Qualified Teams: 8 September 2015

Registration open (qualified teams only): 9 – 30 September 2015

Website: http://rockinrobotchallenge.eu

Robot Launch 2015 is bringing together a great pool of prizes and services for robot startups. All startups in the semis or finals are eligible for awards as we search for offers such as “Crowd Pleaser” or “Best European Startup”. And for the first time, we’ll be offering a grand prize of $5,000 to the winner, in cash or travel. Deadline to enter: July 12! Register now!

According to feedback from startups in last year’s Robot Launch competition, startup services such as legal services, and interviews and business coaching with VC firms are even more valuable than money. We are pleased that this competition will be bringing together some amazing judges with experience in commercializing a wide range of robotics.

Once again, WilmerHale will be providing free startup services to US companies, now joined by LaBarge Weinstein offering legal services to Canadian startups. Robolution Capital will provide business model coaching to a European startup, as will QUT bluebox in Australia.

We’re also able to provide some hardware/software for select startups, including a ROS consulting package from Clearpath Robotics, custom fasteners from Olander and robot development boards from KRTKL. KRTKL’s snickerdoodle is a small and affordable board for powering the next generation of connected robots. With an ARM processor, FPGA, and wireless, snickerdoodle brings new high-end capabilities to open platforms like Linux, ROS, and ArduPilot. If you’re building a robot, you need snickerdoodle. KRTKL will be launching snickerdoodle on Kickstarter soon but Robot Launch semifinalists will be first in line.

Sponsors this year include: Amazon, CSIRO, Clearpath Robotics, SMBC, Robolution Capital, The Olander Company, KRTKL, iRobot, LaBarge Weinstein, WilmerHale, QUT bluebox, Silicon Valley Robotics and Robohub.

We hope to add new prizes throughout the competition, which will take place online over 3 rounds of judging from June to August. The deadline for entry is July 12th.

The competition registration site is here: http://robot2015.istart.org

Source: DRC Blog.

The DRC is all about pushing robotics technology forward. It’s all about creating a community devoted to innovation. And as it comes down to the finale on Friday and Saturday, it will also be about theatre. When spectators take their seats in the Grandstands at the Fairplex on Friday and Saturday, they will see a quartet of virtually identical Finals Courses, or what Kathy Wadham, director of creative programming for Fairplex, thinks of as stage sets. “Anything that needs to be turned into something else, or created here, we do that,” said Wadham during a backstage tour of the concocted disaster zones the robots will have to navigate over and through.

Momentum toward these DRC finals-courses/stage-sets began picking up several months ago when DRC organizers met with Wadham to explain how the courses had to be laid out, so four robots could test their humanitarian assistance skills in parallel. “They said, ‘We have a vision, can you do it?’” Wadham recalled. Those initial meetings led to detailed specifications and drawings and then it was up to Wadham to translate those abstractions into four essentially identical sets that would put the most sophisticated humanoid robots on the planet through some of the most challenging tests they have ever faced.

“I didn’t want it to look cartoonish,” Wadham said. “I wanted it to look real.” And that explains why she had an aha! moment one day as she was doing some rounds on the grounds beyond the Grandstands. She looked up at the roofs of the old horse barns on the premises and she knew she had found the perfect material for the walls of her DRC sets—corrugated tin that had been aging and rusting for 40 years. It was a fitting artistic epiphany, given that the DRC is the Triple Crown of robotics.

Source: DRC Blog.

“We went through our scrap piles to find the doors and the electrical switches,” she said. Those same piles were a gold mine for creating the debris fields in front of the steel staircases on the left side of each set. Each junk heap is an assemblage of rooftop turbine vents (some with long-abandoned birds’ nests inside), gas line piping, beat up steel drums, water heater vessels, and sundry other pieces of detritus. “Some of the stuff was not rusted enough at first,” she said. “So we have a person who rusts and weathers it and makes it look old.”

For some of the details on the set, Walham went shopping. She found the incandescent bulbs for the dingy metal mesh fixtures online and purchased decals of gauges for the square electrical cabinets from a store specializing in retro design.

“We create places,” says Wadham. “That’s what we do.” The precisely dilapidated settings Walham and her Fairplex coworkers ultimately built—each with somewhat different piles of rubble strewn around the periphery but by necessity identical in the areas where the competing robots must traverse—are sure to transport DRC spectators to the earthquake, tsunami or hazerdous industrial zones in which we all hope robots will one day provide life-saving assistance.

Robotica Comedia

Human beings rarely squander an opportunity for comedy. That tendency is holding true in Building Nine of the Fairplex in Pomona, where the DRC teams are preparing their robots for the big race days on Friday and Saturday.

Team THOR members couldn’t stop themselves from adding a doll head and some tattoo sleeves, not to mention a little UCLA bling, to their THOR-RD robot. Source: DRC Blog.

Team VALOR didn’t forget to pack a garden gnome—for a test bed they set up in their garage bay—along with a grab bag of props for their robot ESCHER. Source: DRC Blog.

One more thing: a baby shoe on a stick, here in the hands of team member and graduate student John Seminatore, has proven to be a useful and gentle engineering tool for prodding ESHER’s joints. Source: DRC Blog.

Team Grit makes a Western fashion statement atop its quadruped robot, Cog-Burn. Source: DRC Blog.

Traveling from dozens of locations around the world, the teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge have begun unloading their precious cargo into their respective working bays inside the cavernous Building 9 on the Fairplex site in Pomona, CA. Each team has pulled off its own logistics miracle to pack up not only their robots but also huge chunks of their home laboratories into a truck’s-worth of boxes and crates. Today they are reassembling these small mountains of tech gear into 24 sophisticated pop-up robotics laboratories. One member with Team Hector, coming all the way from the Technische Universitat in Darmstadt, Germany, said there was almost nothing left in the lab back home.

Teams start arriving to set-up their garages in preparation for the Robotics Competition. Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course. The event is free to attend and open to the public. It takes place at Fairplex (home of the LA County Fair) in Pomona, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles.

Already at breakfast time, Building 9 was filled with the sounds of construction: a fleet of student-pulled dollies bearing robot parts and tools, fork lifts with sturdy crates, and massive, beeping materials-handling vehicles delivering cinder blocks and wooden frameworks that some teams will use to build replicas of the emergency-response tasks their robots will face later in the week. Now and again, team members rolled in a robot hanging on an aluminum framework—for now, looking like inanimate futuristic manikins—as other robots sat frozen, their arms and hands up in front of their faces like boxers in a defensive position.

Already apparent in Building 9 are signs of collaboration among teams and an eager comparing of notes. But apparent also was a rising competitive energy as teams were able to peer into each other’s pop-up laboratories and get first glimpses of their robot rivals. And already on everyone’s mind is which robots and which teams will come out on top.

Who wouldn’t love a win, place or show, and the respective take-home prizes of $2 million, $1 million and $500,000? But the far more valuable result of the entire DRC, noted DARPA program manager Gill Pratt during a welcome session on Sunday evening, transcends the specific outcome of the competition. The priceless payoff, really already in hand, is the community of researchers the DRC has catalyzed into existence with the collective goal of pushing robotic technology forward.

To come later from the DRC, Pratt and other participants expect, are robots that can open a pressure-relief valve to prevent a disastrous explosion in a nuclear power plant or disarm improvised explosive devices on battlefields. But as spectators will witness on Friday and Saturday, getting there will be a one-step-at-a-time journey.

Teams start arriving to set-up their garages in preparation for the Robotics Competition. Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course. The event is free to attend and open to the public. It takes place at Fairplex (home of the LA County Fair) in Pomona, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles.

Teams start arriving to set-up their garages in preparation for the Robotics Competition. Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course. The event is free to attend and open to the public. It takes place at Fairplex (home of the LA County Fair) in Pomona, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles.

Students brainstorm during the design hackathon at the 2015 Skolkovo International Robotics Conference. Photo credit: Skolkovo.

https://youtu.be/Rh4B4dhyIHk

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

Five short videos prepared by U.S. high school students have been selected as winning entries in DARPA’s “Robots4Us” video contest and will be featured at a June 7 invitational workshop on the future of robotics. DARPA launched the contest to stimulate student consideration of the societal implications of robotics.

Winners created compelling short videos about the future of robots in society and will get the chance to discuss their ideas and see current cutting-edge robots in action.

The student winners, whose videos look ahead to a future when robots will play ever more important roles in fields ranging from agriculture to medicine to emergency response, will travel as DARPA’s guests to the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, to be held in Pomona, Calif., on June 5 and 6. There, state-of-the-art robots prepared by more than 20 top robotics organizations from around the world will compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt to complete humanitarian assistance tasks on a simulated disaster-response course.

The next day, the student winners will participate in a day-long DARPA workshop in Pomona, “From Better Robots to Better Futures.” That event will feature lessons learned by the top three DRC teams, announcements of future international robotics challenges and activities, and visions offered by industry and government leaders about the ways in which robots may become integrated into society in the future. The student winners will participate in a panel discussion about their videos and offer their visions and perspectives on issues to consider. The workshop will be webcast on DARPA’s YouTube page, where the Robots4Us winning videos—approximately three minutes each—will debut that day.

“DARPA wanted to hear from the generation that will be the first to grow up and live with a wide range of robotics technologies. Their ideas about how robots might make a difference for society will shape that future,” said DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar. “We appreciate the thought these students put into their creations. And we were inspired by their visions about the influence robotics could have in our businesses, our homes, and in the military.”

Robots4Us contest student winners are:

• Kristina Argao, Hagatna, Guam (Teammate: Riezzalyn Viray)
• Ben Chrepta, Rochester, Minn. (Teammate: Alden Giedraitis)
• Hector Cruz, Cedar City, Utah
• Shiloh Curtis, Santa Cruz, Calif.
• Atticus Jones, New York, N.Y. (Teammates: Kentaro Jones and Jigme Tinley)

A panel of judges with expertise in robotics technology, videography, science communication, and social and ethical issues evaluated the video submissions. The judges based their scores on how clearly each entrant communicated his or her vision of the future; creativity, thoughtfulness, originality and appeal; and technical quality.

Stay tuned in here to learn more about the Robots4Us contest and the DARPA Robotics Challenge, and to view the student-developed videos and watch the live webcast of the “Better Robots: Better Futures” workshop on June 7. More detail about DARPA’s goals for the Robots4Us contest is also available in this launch video:

The DRC finals will occur June 5-6, 2015 at Fairplex in Pomona, California. The event will require robots to attempt a circuit of consecutive physical tasks, with degraded communications between the robots and their operators; Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course.

This post originally appeared on the DARPA Robotics Challenge blog. 

By Rachel Gould

The 2016 agBOT Robotic Seeding Challenge challenges participants to build unmanned robotic equipment to plant, measure and track multiple crop seeds to improve farming efficiency. The objective of the agBOT challenge is to reduce the harmful chemical by-products and erosion caused by inefficient farming techniques. The challenge will also inspire new solutions to reduce farms’ carbon footprints while increasing production – essential given that the agricultural sector must support the projected global population of nine billion by the year 2050. Clearpath Robotics, in conjunction with airBridge, is proud to offer a $50,000 grant toward the purchase of the Grizzly Robotic Utility Vehicle for teams in the 2016 challenge.

More about agBOT

The 2016 agBOT competition will be held on May 7, 2016. Additional challenges are set for 2017 and 2018. The 2016 competition will be hosted by Gerrish Farms in Rockville, Indiana, where competitors will be challenged to revolutionize the industry by improving precision and efficiency.

Feeding the world’s nine billion people

Although farming has become mechanized, the evolution of agricultural techniques to include unmanned robots provides a unique opportunity. The agricultural sector can increase productivity and sustainability by using intelligent robotics to analyze current farming practices including fertilization and seedling variety. This concept is paramount in the world of shrinking farming circles and an ever-growing population.

The bot to get it done!

Grizzly RUV seeding a field.

This year’s agBOT competition requires a robot that can function as an unmanned crop seeder; it must plant two types of seeds over half-mile-long rows. It must also supply real-time data using a mobile tracking antenna and a variety of analytics including down pressure and variety placement. Participating teams are responsible for developing all software, sensors and human-machine control interfaces to control tasks.

This complex list of requirements requires a flexible, rugged, high performing solution, which is why we’re excited to partner with airBridge to offer a $50,000 grant for Grizzlies that are used in the competition.

Grizzly RUV in a corn field.

Grizzly is Clearpath’s largest all-terrain battery operated robot. The mobile research platform offers the performance of a mini-tractor and the precision of a robot with a max payload of 1320 lbs, max speed of 12 mph, 8 inches of ground clearance, and 5V, 12V, 24V and 48V user powers. See here for all technical specs.

Ready to participate in the agBOT 2016 challenge? Want to take advantage of this unique Grizzly grant opportunity? Get in touch with one of our unmanned experts.

• Drought and desertification: How robots might help
• 2 agricultural robotics projects funded under latest Horizon 2020
• Are agricultural robots ready? 27 companies profiled
• Will agricultural robots arrive in time to keep fruit and vegetable costs down?

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

The IdeaHub recently announced the launch of a robotics accelerator programme, run on behalf of ABB Robotics, to deliver solutions to some of the biggest issues facing robotics today and in the future. The accelerator is composed of three broad but distinct challenges: ‘Simplicity’, ‘Deep learning’ and ‘Ecosystem’. Running until July 2015, the challenges offers students, academics, entrepreneurs and businesses the chance to collaborate with ABB Robotics to take their concept or business to the next level of development.

Simplicity

Under the heading of ‘Simplicity’ the challenge asks, ‘How could the next generation of robots interact with humans?’ By 2017 the number of installed industrial robots worldwide is expected to exceed two million and they will be working increasingly closer with people in their workplaces and homes. This presents a huge opportunity for innovation as robots come to new industries, to new environments and work with a wide range of people – both trained and untrained.

One example of this change is ABB Robotics’ new collaborative robot, YuMi®, which can operate in very close collaboration with humans thanks to its inherently safe design. This design opens up completely new ways for robots to work and interact with their new human colleagues and be truly transformational. The question for roboticists is whether they and their idea could benefit from some collaboration with ABB Robotics to reach the next level?

Deep Learning

The second challenge seeks to bring the huge strides being made in artificial intelligence to the future workplace with robots capable of learning on the job. Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days – in devices like your phone, your car and even your thermostat. Meanwhile robots are moving from making cars to driving them. But what could this mean for connected robots working and learning in industrial environments? How will the industrial robot of the future learn from its experience, or from that of its robot colleagues, to make decisions and do things differently?

Ecosystem

The final challenge reflects the fact that, in today’s connected work environments, while no man is an island, no robot is either. Robots operate within a commercial and technical ecosystem of infrastructure, sensors, accessories, technicians, operating systems and software. When this ecosystem works well, productivity is optimised – but how can we move to the next level, where productivity is multiplied? This requires an ecosystem where industrial robots that traditionally work in line, step out and collaborate with each other and their human colleagues in new and different ways.

Students, academics, entrepreneurs and businesses who have an idea, concept or technology that can address any of these challenges, in whole or in part, are invited to apply to the IdeaHub for the opportunity to further develop their ideas with ABB Robotics.

Example entries could include collaborative technologies, sensor applications, decision-making software and environmental awareness systems. In fact, the only limitations are that all ideas and concepts should have an applicability to industry of any type and something tangible about them, capable of being demonstrated at the pitch day event.

The best ideas submitted will be selected during July for the opportunity to pitch directly to ABB Robotics with the winners receiving an offer from ABB Robotics which could include funding, access to robots, venture support or market access based on your needs.

To get in on the action, potential applicants need to complete the simple online form at the IdeaHub website and upload a short webcam or phone video about their idea. Applicants need only provide information already in the public domain and which they are happy to share.

Applications will be accepted until the 7^th July with shortlisted candidates contacted later that month to pitch their ideas at the IdeaHub event in August.

The IdeaHub is an accelerator platform operated by Venturebright, a growth consultancy consisting of three partners Tanvir Mufti, Cristina Warren, and Simon Blair, who between them have a little under 50 years cumulative experience innovating within the corporate environment.

Tanvir from Venturebright describes their business model: “We specialise in bringing together entrepreneurs, start-ups and corporates. We combine the capabilities, energy and agility of start-ups with the assets, market insight and reach of corporates to launch valuable new ventures. While we think the VC funding model is great, there are other things that entrepreneurs might be looking for, aside from just funding. Some may be looking for access to technology to build their product, for customers willing to test their products or for access to markets to sell their product. These are things a corporate can often provide and we use the IdeaHub platform to make connections and then translate between entrepreneurs and corporates in order to make really interesting things happen for both.”

Soft robotics combines the design of electromechanical systems with the study of soft and flexible materials, often inspired by biological systems. A growing number of research groups, companies, and individual designers and makers have been contributing to the field in recent years. The Soft Robotics Toolkit was launched in September 2014 and is intended to enable students, designers, and researchers to share and build upon each other’s work in this exciting area. The toolkit is a website containing documentation on the design, construction, and characterization of soft component technologies including sensors, actuators, and control boards.

In the seven months since its launch, the toolkit has had almost 250,000 page views by over 40,000 users in 150 countries. In light of the incredible outpouring of support from the community, the toolkit development team has announced two competitions for soft robotics design and research. The aim of these competitions is to recognize those who make soft robotics such an exciting area and to reward individuals and teams who advance the field.

The first competition, the 2015 Prize for Contributions in Soft Robotics, is intended to support and promote research that advances the field of soft robotics. The toolkit website currently contains documentation from seven research groups at Harvard and ETH, and further contributions from leading soft robotics groups at other institutions are forthcoming. Researchers are invited to submit original work to the toolkit in order to be considered for the prize. An international panel of expert judges will award one entry a grand prize of $5,000. Example entries might include new control architectures or component technologies, novel methods of modeling and analyzing compliant electromechanical systems, or new experimental procedures for characterizing soft devices.

The second competition, the Soft Robotics Design Competition 2015, rewards individuals and teams who create new and interesting devices using material they can find on the toolkit website. Example projects might include robots capable of manipulating delicate objects or of novel forms of locomotion, or improved control systems for soft robotic systems. Eligible designs may be entirely “soft,” or may combine traditional rigid robotic elements with soft components. The only limitation (besides entrants’ imaginations) is that the design must make use of at least one component technology from the Soft Robotics Toolkit website. The judging panel, composed of designers and researchers from industry and academia, will select a winning entry and two runners-up for prizes of $3,000 and $1,000 respectively.

In order to be considered for the awards, entrants must register by May 15^th, with the final project documentation due June 15^th. The response so far has been fantastic. To date, 66 teams have registered to participate, with 23 countries and 34 universities represented. For more information on how to participate, please see the competition website.

Innorobo 2014.

Innorobo’s call for start-ups has just closed and 25 semi-finalists from around the world will now be reviewed by a jury of experts to select the five winners. The winners will pitch to investors at a plenary conference and exhibit free of charge at Innorobo, the international robotics summit. Why does Innoecho – the consulting company specialized in driving disruptive technologies to market, and organizer of Innorobo – hold such a call?

The Call for Start-ups initiative came up three years ago in order to meet robotics entrepreneurs’ need to connect with a broader ecosystem. Professional and personal service robotics is an emerging, thriving field thanks to an ever-growing wealth of entrepreneurial projects. Entrepreneurs in this arena need connections with an extensive international network to develop and reach their market as swiftly as possible.

A few years back, most investors set their sights on Internet entrepreneurial initiatives and hardware projects (with high investment needs, a long, complex prototyping / beta test process and lower gross margin forecasts), and had a tough time finding any kind of seed or development funding. Today, Innorobo brings together an audience of 10,000 decision-makers in robotics and related technologies, as well as from industry, service companies, research laboratories, the academic sphere, public institutions, the investment/finance world and the media. In this way, Innorobo’s “Call for Start-ups” connects entrepreneurial ventures with a broad, meaningful ecosystem.

Since the tech boom, many organizations have been set up to support entrepreneurship, and robotics has become a hot topic in mature economies. In addition to love money, start-ups can now benefit from crowdfunding platforms, business angels, industrial partners and investors specializing in hardware ventures. This is illustrated in Europe, which has a healthy early-stage startup scene.

The number of European accelerators and incubators has increased dramatically since the start of the financial crisis. Between 2007 and 2013, the number rose by nearly 400%. In 2013, a study by Telefonica identified 260 organizations in 10 European countries. This dizzying growth in funding providers does nevertheless make it harder for start-ups to pinpoint the one that best meets their needs. One size doesn’t fit all, and entrepreneurs sometimes get lost in the maze of huge groups or multiple supporting institutions (clusters, incubators, investors network, etc.) in various “vertical” technological fields (mechanical engineering, electronics, software, mechatronics, etc.). Innorobo can put entrepreneurs in contact with the right key stakeholders for their project.

In addition, these structures are mainly regional – only 15% of the incubators/accelerators in Europe are “international” – and the Telefonica survey recommends European leaders take decisive steps to make country borders meaningless for entrepreneurs. Finally, while some countries have laid out roadmaps, built institutions and seen private organizations sprouting up to support robotics entrepreneurs, others are lacking a structured business ecosystem. Hence, Innorobo provides both a dynamic international marketplace and a structure that nurtures the amazing entrepreneurial spirit of robotics. Though we “physically” bring people together around projects, we also provide services that go beyond the confines of a physical location. Start-ups need international exposure from the very start in order to move from the prototype phase to the production stage and find their first customers. We work hard to promote innovation, competitiveness, technology transfer and other key public policy aims of and across all participating countries.

More importantly, over the years, Innorobo’s team has built lasting connections with many people and projects in the diverse fields of robotics. It is not just about a database of more than 3,000 robotics companies, it is about real interactions with passionate people who are truly working to make the world a better place. There are some entrepreneurs who know how to communicate and capitalize on their network as part of their strategy, and others who don’t. We believe all energy and efforts would be better focused on principles that help push innovation forward, on substance versus style. The Call for Start-ups jury is handpicked to reflect these values.

Innoecho believes in open innovation, in international partnerships and in a globalized world with social responsibility. To help meet the challenges our world is facing today, we believe we must go beyond the typical national or continental business visions and create a global network that will generate a host of opportunities for every entrepreneurial venture to find its fair share of business and truly impact society for the better.

Come visit our hall dedicated to start-ups and discover the innovations that are going to make the world a better place.

A special thanks to Robohub readers for voting for your favorite videos in the People’s Choice Award, this year’s videos have been viewed more than 1’250’000 times in the past two weeks with widespread coverage in mainstream media.

Best Video

Best Student Video

People’s Choice Award

You can view all the other incredible videos here, or watch them below.

Example of visualization of the euRathlon 2013 Common Shared Data Set (CSDS) for the scenario “Search and rescue in a smoke-filled underground structure”. Technically, it’s a ROS rviz visualization of a recorded sensor rosbag. Photo credit: euRathlon

euRathlon is an EU-funded project that aims to set the standard for research through robotics competitions. It not only provides opportunities to test advanced emergency response robots in very challenging outdoor scenarios, but also recognises that there is an urgent need to develop useful metrics that will advance the field. A series of Common Shared Data Sets of real data gathered before and during the competitions are now available to the robotics community through a cloud tool sponsored by ECmanaged. euRathlon is staging a series of outdoor robotics competitions for land, sea and air robots, inspired by the 2011 Fukushima accident. After successful land and sea competitions in 2013 and 2014 respectively, the project will stage the three-domain euRathlon 2015 Challenge in Piombino, Italy, from 17th-25th of September 2015.

Real data in realistic scenarios

Participating in outdoor competitions is a great opportunity for roboticists to test their vehicles and gather real data in realistic scenarios. The seven euRathlon partners have contributed their expertise in each domain (land, sea and air robotics) to design realistic but also achievable scenarios that are oriented to emergency-services and industry demands. The scenarios also aim to be:

1. technically demanding, i.e. pushing the boundaries of the state of the art,
2. relevant to the research, industry and user communities, and
3. feasible in the context of a competition both in terms of logistics and evaluation.

The importance of Common Shared Data Sets (CSDS)

Teams that are either new to the competition or have limited access to proper hardware and training areas face the problem that they cannot test their system against typical settings as they would appear in the competition. Also the comparison of methods or configurations requires an exactly reproducible data stream from all sensor inputs. A classical approach to coping with this situation is to provide standardized Common Shared Data Sets (CSDS). Many fields in science and engineering employ standardized CSDS to evaluate similar research, approaches, or techniques and to provide the means for their comparison. Common Shared Data Sets are a good base from which to accelerate the progress of the state-of-the-art in research.

We believe that sharing data reinforces open scientific research, promotes new research and encourages a diversity of analysis and opinions. This is why one of our goals is to provide a framework for the community to discuss and work towards the development of metrics, scenarios and other matters of relevance. The metrics and the euRathlon 2015 challenge scenarios draft are open for discussion in the web-based euRathlon forum.

euRathlon 2015 Common Shared Data Set (CSDS) aerial outdoor task. Image acquired by the UAV at the maximum resolution during the high altitude flight. Photo credits: CATEC

euRathlon CSDS are available to the robotics community

The repository of Common Shared Data Sets produced before and during the euRathlon competitions is a valuable pool for testing, benchmarking and comparison. ECmanaged, a Spanish-based company, sponsors euRathlon with a cloud storage tool that allows the open dissemination of the data sets and other online materials to the robotics community and public in general.

In the euRathlon 2013 land competition, we have previously made available recorded real data sets of the scenarios from the real trials area; and in the euRathlon 2014 sea competition, teams could test one week prior the competition in the real location with the objects used in the competition. The euRathlon 2013 land competition CSDS and the euRathlon 2014 sea competition CSDS generously provided by teams participating in the competitions are now available to the community.

For the euRathlon 2015 competition, we have generated two datasets for the aerial domain: a dataset of indoor tasks and a dataset of outdoor tasks. These data sets have been created from real data collected with real systems in real field experiments. The experiments are designed to be similar to the scenarios that teams will face during the euRathlon 2015. The euRathlon 2015 Challenge CSDS (provided by the organisers) can be used to test and improve robotic systems, and we hope will also help to motivate multi-domain teams to participate in the competition.

Teams could test their AUVs in the real location one week before euRathlon 2014 competition. Photo credit: CMRE

About ECmanaged

ECmanaged is a multi-Cloud and IT management tool that enables users to take full control of their Cloud Platforms and Physical servers at the implementation phase and afterwards. Its design and interface allow users to develop Cloud platforms while avoiding provider-imposed restrictions. ECmanaged combines a monitoring tool with automated management actions such as alerting, auto-scaling and disaster recovery. It uses a novel approach of high-level platform modelling allowing Cloud platforms to be developed avoiding provider imposed restrictions. The deployment of applications is also simplified through the use of predefined templates and images. A key feature is the automated incident resolution with up to 80% of incidents being solved without any human intervention in less than 5 minutes.

Minesweepers competition arena with surface and buried mines.

Minesweepers: Towards a Landmine-Free World is an outdoor robotic competition initiated by IEEE Robotics and Automation Society – Egypt Chapter that aims to raise public awareness of the seriousness of the landmines and unexploded ordnances (UXOs) contamination and the role of science and technology in solving this serious problem. The final competition took place last month at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. 

Minesweepers was designed as a technical challenge to motivate new research and applications of mobile robotics in the area of humanitarian demining, and participants had to face many challenges not typically found in other robotic competitions. The rough landscape of the minefields can take a toll on a vehicle’s locomotion system, and the sunny, hot and dusty climate makes it impossible to use traditional electronics meant for indoor use. Minefields are also frequently strewn with small metal fragments that can camouflage landmines and cause high false detection rate, and so detection systems must be able to differentiate between buried/surface mines and randomly scattered metal fragments.

The competition had three main categories:

• Minesweepers–Academia: for undergraduate and postgraduate students, where only metallic objects are in the competition arena; landmine detection and minefield mapping were required.
• Minesweepers-Juniors: for elementary and high school students, where only metallic objects were in the competition arena; only landmine detection was required.
• Minesweepers–Industry: for professional companies where metallic and non-metallic objects with different dimensions and profiles were in the competition arena; and landmine detection, landmine imaging and minefield mapping were required.

Some of the robots participating in the local and final rounds of the Minesweepers competition.

Each participating team was required to construct a teleoperated/autonomous unmanned ground/aerial vehicle that could search for underground and aboveground anti-personnel landmines and unexploded ordnances (UXOs). Teams had to visualize the position and the type of object and overlay this information on the minefield map, and their robots were required to navigate through rough terrain that mimicked a real minefield.

The competition attracted many undergraduate and postgraduate students from various universities who were primarily motived by the technical challenge and the need to raise awareness about the problem of humanitarian demining. 115 teams from 9 countries subscribed to participate in the competition, 45 of which passed the eligibility round. A local round was organized in Egypt as a classification round for the final event in Portugal. In this local round, 35 teams participated, and the best three teams from each category went on to participate in the final event in Portugal.

Participants in the final round in Coimbra, Portugal.

Five teams from Portugal and Egypt successfully participated in the final round of the competition: Husky team (ISR, University of Coimbra, Portual), Pioneer team (1st place, MUST-Misr University for Science & Technology, Egypt), Robosapien team (2nd place, October 6 University, Egypt), Minebusters team (3rd Place, German University in Cairo, Egypt) and Divergent (1st Junior team, Mansoura High School for Girls, Egypt). Other four qualified teams from Belgium, UK, Bolivia and Tunisia were unable to join the final round due to financial and technical problems. No teams qualified to participate in the industry category.

The success of the Minesweepers competition will be measured by its long-term sustainability. The goal is to run the competition annually, and next year more technical challenges will be considered, such as exploring the applicability of multirobot systems in minefield reconnaissance and mapping.

The ultimate goal of this competition is to put into practice the new strategic mission of IEEE, “…to foster technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity” and to serve as an educational and a research forum to provide efficient, reliable, adaptive and cost-effective solutions for the serious problem of humanitarian demining, which impacts many countries across the world. The competition also motivates the participants to create new companies and industries geared towards minefield reconnaissance and mapping technologies. The applicability of the robotic systems presented in this competition can be extended to a wide range of other applications such as security and surveillance, search and rescue, health monitoring of civil infrastructure, pipeline monitoring, and environment monitoring.

Minesweepers was organized this year by the Institute for Systems and Robotics, University of Coimbra under the auspices of IEEE RAS Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology (RAS-SIGHT) and in collaboration with Hadath for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Generous support was also provided by the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT), Misr University for Science & Technology (MUST), October High Institute for Engineering & Technology and IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

For more information, visit http://www.landminefree.org/

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

• Minesweepers: Towards a landmine-free world
• First TRADR EU FP7 Joint Exercise (TJEx)
• Introducing the Cybathlon
• € 7M EuRoC competition opens call to ignite EU manufacturing industry

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

The international slate of teams – including squads from universities in China, France, India, Peru, Turkey and across the United States – brought their talent and training to bear on one of today’s hottest mechanical technologies: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or as they are better known, drones. Each team had designed and built a powerful, maneuverable, remotely-piloted drone to fly in this year’s competition.

http://youtu.be/IQ4Cqzvhrvk

Today, drones are one of the world’s hottest technologies. Though an industry still in its infancy, drones and their potential have captured the imaginations of leaders in business, government and academia. They promise new solutions for difficult, dangerous or time-critical tasks in industries from agriculture to emergency medicine, from energy to journalism and beyond.

The SDC Challenge for 2014: design and build an original drone, pilot it successfully through a series of high and low obstacles, complete a targeted payload drop, and return to the start — in one piece.

Student engineer Oscar Wall Arias of the Instituto Tecnológico de Ciudad Juarez (Mexico) exemplified not only the technical excellence of the assembled teams but their humane ambition. “We’re engineers,” Arias said. “We’re here to do good, to build, to make human lives better. What a great thing to be here with all these great teams today.”

At day’s end, the University of North Dakota team took first place with their massive 78.4lb. gleaming steel-and-aluminum machine. Second place went to the nine-man, black-clad squad from California Polytechnic State University. Third place was taken by the “Airwolf,” the drone flown by the “Wolfpack” team from North Carolina State University.

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

Every year, the SDC tests the mettle of young engineering students through a design-and-build challenge based on latest developments in industry and academia. A committee of ASME members led by Dr. Tim Hodges, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Virginia Military Institute, works throughout the year to bring the SDC to life.

“Students get to use their engineering knowledge to design and build a vehicle, and then they get to compare their work with that of their peers,” Hodges said. “It gives them lots of confidence to work into the future and toward employment in the real world. And they have done such a wonderful job.” Wearing protective glasses and clutching clipboards, Hodges and his colleagues also served as judges of the competition.

And a great day of competition it was: motors roared; assembled crowds hooted, laughed, and cheered; multicolored, multi-propellered flying robots swooped and zoomed high, loud and sometimes dangerously close to the competitors and judges in the arena. Judges’ papers were repeatedly blown away by the windy force of the machines in flight. And though many succeeded, several entries crashed and shattered, with carbon-fiber blades and aluminum struts flying in all directions.

ASME President J. Robert Sims was deeply impressed by what he saw. “From looking at the exhibits and talking to the students, their dedication and expertise is just amazing,” Sims said. “These folks are going to do well in the future in engineering. It’s just a very impressive group – all of them. Whether they’re winners or not in the finals, they are incredible individuals.”

Said Scott McDaniel of North Dakota’s winning team: “We drove two full days to get here from North Dakota – I’m so glad we did!”

Full Roster of Teams in ASME 2014 Student Design Competition

North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC)
Wentworth IT (Boston, MA)
New York Institute of Technology (New York, NY)
University of North Dakota (Grand Forks, ND)
University of St. Thomas (Saint Paul, MN)
University of Arkansas at Little Rock (Little Rock, AR)
Texas Tech University (Lubbock, TX)
California Polytechnic State University (San Luis Obispo, CA)
University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA)
Germanna Community College (Fredericksburg, VA)
Baker College (Flint, MI)
Instituto Tecnológico de Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua, Mexico)
BITS Pilani (Dubai, UAE)
University of Engineering & Technology Lahore (Lahore, Pakistan)
Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria (Lima, Peru)
Yeditepe University (Istanbul, Turkey)
Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong)
Prince Mohammad bin Fahd University (Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia)
SRM University (Tamil Nadu, India)
ISAE Supaero (Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace – Toulouse, France)
National Tsing Hua University (Hsinchu, Taiwan)

In September 2014 Amazon announced the Amazon Picking Challenge, a new robot manipulation contest as part of the ICRA robot challenges. The idea was to take a difficult problem from the warehouse order-fulfillment industry and see how far contestants can get applying innovative robotics research. The challenge is centered around a problem the robotics community has been chipping away at for decades: picking various, distinct items off of a shelf under uncertain conditions. The location of the item is only known within a few dozen centimeters, and only vague high-level information is known about the item itself. The challenge description has obvious roots in warehouse fulfillment, but this is clearly a generic task robots need to get better at to be useful in a variety of everyday contexts.

When inventory comes into an Amazon warehouse it is singulated (pulled apart into individual items a customer might purchase) and stocked into shelves, and the location of the item is tagged in a warehouse management system. Later, when the item is ordered, a person is directed to the shelf that contains this item and picks it off. Shelves are often stocked as densely as possible to maximize the value of the warehouse. In a system that handles millions of different products, it is economical to store a variety of items in the same space. The resulting mixed and cluttered bin is relatively easy for a human to work with, but poses a challenge for traditional automation systems.

We might have an idea of what the item ordinarily looks like beforehand, but perhaps this time the packaging has changed color, the manufacturer has added an extra plastic bag to protect it, or it is folded in half inside the bin. Products in an Amazon warehouse have a wide range of visual and physical properties. A real product is rarely just a simple brown cardboard box. It could be a large stuffed animal, a floppy bag of rice, a package of cookies (cookies are more appetizing in their un-crushed state), a necklace, or a small USB stick. The goal in creating this challenge was to clearly define a simplified but applicable version of the real world problem.

The ICRA challenge lists 27 different items that will be randomly stocked inside of a pre-defined shelf structure. The challenge carefully avoids putting constraints on the solution space. The goal of this first challenge year is not to drive toward any one specific software or hardware architecture, but to provide the robotics community with a difficult, real-world problem. The human arm has 7 degrees-of-freedom, but is this really the best configuration to complete such a task? Robot end-effector designs are undergoing a renaissance (as evidenced by the variety of new gripper companies appearing each year), but which design fits well in tight spaces? Perhaps calling this the ‘Picking’ challenge was misleading. Pick and place is a convenient categorization for robotics, but observation of human strategies in these tasks has shown that human manipulation is far more nuanced than the simple approach-grasp-retreat paradigm we traditionally see in a robot. Humans take advantage of many different environmental constraints to perform the task effectively.

The response from the community so far has been fantastic. Over 150 people have signed up for the contest email list, and three robot distributors have agreed to bring base platforms if necessary for teams that can’t bring their own bot (Rethink Robotics with the Baxter Research Robot, Clearpath Robotics with the PR2 Robot, and Olympus Controls with the UR5). We hope this is the beginning of a fun and fruitful event that helps bring together subdomains of robot manipulation to accomplish some very cool tasks. We look forward to seeing everyone at ICRA in 2015!

The first deadline for the challenge is to submit a video this year to receive free challenge supplies in the mail (items and a shelf). Learn more at: http://amazonpickingchallenge.org.

ALCOR laboratory’s BlueBotics Absolem in the field.

ALCOR Lab members describe their experience.

From September 23rd to October 2nd the first TRADR Joint Exercise (TJEx) took place at the Tremora hospital (ex American hospital of Calambrone) near Pisa, Italy, in cooperation with the TRADR partners and the firefighters from the Firebrigade of Pisa. Using a proven-in-practice user-centric design methodology, TRADR develops novel science and technology for human-robot teams to assist in disaster response efforts over multiple missions.Various kinds of robots collaborate with human team members to explore the environment, and gather physical samples. As part of the user-centric development process adopted by the TRADR project, the Joint Exercise plays an important role in establishing and maintaining close contact with the end-users. TRADR is an integrated research project funded by the EU FP7 Programme, ICT: Cognitive systems, interaction, robotics.

A firefighter wearing the Gaze Machine.

ALCOR Lab is one of the project partners and participated at the exercise with its own UGV and the Gaze Machine, which is a head mounted device that allows estimation at each instant as the wearer looks around the 3D environment. One of the main goals was to test the system components, and to run the system at the hospital site with the participation of end-users. We also collected various useful data and ran component-level experiments.

The first week was dedicated to the appropriate set-up and test of the integrated system. At the same time, various discussion groups examined specific issues such as planning, reasoning and robot behavior, user interfaces, database technology and architecture. During the first two days, we tested the functionality of the UAVs and the UGVs in terms of autonomous navigation, mapping in 3D and high-level planning. The third day, the firefighters from the Firebrigade of Pisa offered a demonstration of the canine search team. By the end of the first week, everything was perfectly planned and ready for the second phase, when the integrated system was run in the Tremora hospital together with the end-users.

Exercise of the Pisa USAR team.

The following days, we successfully performed missions with the complete system in simulated disaster scenario. In parallel, we worked with the firefighters to do a series of experiments using the Gaze Machine. Each firefighter wore the Gaze Machine and entered a partially collapsed building, examining the environment and communicating useful information to their colleagues outside the site. During the experiments we collected data about the areas that they visually inspected, together with the information they communicated to their colleagues.

Responsible for the multi-robot planning and of course the Gaze Machine, we are pleased that our lab has contributed to the successful outcome of the first TRADR Joint Exercise.

The TRADR team captured by the UAV.

Exercise of the Pisa USAR team.

Exercise of the Pisa USAR team.

The working environment outside the hospital.

Team Avalon tuning their underwater robot for the combined scenario. (copyright Nicolas Jourden/CMRE-euRathlon)

euRathlon is an outdoor robotics competition funded by the European Union with a focus on realistic cooperative mock emergency-response scenarios in three different domains: land, sea and air. On the third and fourth days of the euRathlon 2014 marine competition the teams faced two more tasks, and in the last day a combined scenario that included the tasks of the previous days. Visitors saw a demonstration of cooperation between an aerial robot and a land robot, as an advance of euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge. The winners of the five euRathlon 2014 scenarios were unveiled at the award ceremony in the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in La Spezia.

(See also euRathlon 2014 Sea competition recap: Day 1 and 2.)

Team CISSAU (Ensta Bretagne) deploying in the water their Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). (copyright Nicolas Jourden/CMRE-euRathlon)

Third day scenario: Interaction with underwater structures

In this scenario the underwater robots had to reach the manipulation area where there was a piping assembly structure. In one of the pipes there was a lever to be manipulated.
The robots had to touch the structure and maintain contact with it, close the stopcocks and bring to the surface a pole (with a ring on the top) that had been fixed to the sea bottom. Teams had different time slots depending on the degree of used autonomy. The three modalities were:

1) Fully autonomous: an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) without a cable. The AUV could communicate with an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) acoustically or with the operator located on the shore.

2) Semi-autonomous: no human tele-operation. Sensory data could be received and high level commands could be sent by the operator to the AUV or the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), but low-level joystick driving was not allowed.

3) Tele-operation: human tele-operation in a low-level joystick driving. The vehicle could not be connected to the shore, but could be connected to a surface vehicle that acted as a communications relay for the tele-operation. The surface vehicle in this case could be moored.

In the fully autonomous robots mode, the teams had 70 minutes, for the semi-autonomous mode they had 55minutes, and for tele-operated mode they had a total of 40 minutes.

Rain was present on Wednesday morning. Only three teams participated in this scenario: University of Girona, Avalon and CISSAU. Despite the rain all teams performed well and completed the scenario. Most of the teams combined full autonomy in the inspection and contact tasks, with tele-operation in the ring and stopcock manipulation.

Spectators waiting for the aerial and land cooperation demonstration. (copyright Nicolas Jourden/CMRE-euRathlon)

Fourth day scenario: Environmental survey of the accident area (mapping)

This scenario took place in a marina dock area. The robots had to complete an environmental survey of a specified area. The underwater vehicles had to inspect a wall to find an anomaly and localise a number of submerged Objects of Potential Interest (OPIs) represented by orange buoys. After completing the scenario, the teams had to download the information and create a map with the position of the OPIs.

On Thursday morning the sun shone again. Two of the six teams decided to withdraw due to technical problems with the navigation of their vehicles. The four teams participating were: Avalon, SAUC’ISSE, University of Girona and CISSAU. All of them completed the scenario successfully. The wall inspection was a difficult task for most of the robots, due to the particular rounded shape created by the rocks in one of the corners of the dock area.
Teams had a maximum of 60 minutes to complete this scenario and the teams had an hour more to process the data and give it to the judges.

Team ROBDOS testing. (copyright Nicolas Jourden/CMRE-euRathlon)

Fifth day scenario: Combined scenario

This scenario took place in the coastal water area and the marina dock area, and was a combination of the four previous days’ scenarios. It included three different tasks: “Autonomous underwater navigation”, “Mapping the area and wall following/anomaly detection” and “pick and bring to the surface the pole ring”. The scenario ended when the AUV surfaced with the pole ring object. Teams had a maximum of 75 minutes to complete the scenario.

The judges on the boat and inside the sonar cabin evaluated in real time the teams’ performances. Once the scenario finished, maps with the trajectories of the vehicles and the OPIs localisations were created from the data given by the teams.

Four teams participated in this last scenario: University of Girona, Avalon, SAUC’ISSE and CISSAU. All the teams performed well, especially when taking into account the difficulty of the combined scenario. Only the University of Girona and SAUCI’SSE completed the three tasks. SAUC’ISSE and Avalon were able to demonstrate cooperation between a USV and an AUV.

Demonstration of aerial and land robots cooperation

The demonstration of the cooperation between an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) that took place on Friday offered a preview of what spectators can expect to see in euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge. The event was held at CMRE and open to the press and public. Attendees standing behind a security line saw the cooperation between a land vehicle and a quadrotor. The demo was performed by the Centre for Advanced Aerospace Technologies (CATEC), Seville, Spain and the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy.

Team SAUC’ISSE (Ensta Bretagne) carrying an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) (copyright Nicolas Jourden/CMRE-euRathlon)

Dynamic display

Parallel to the competition, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), challenged teams to participate in their underwater tests.

euRathlon 2014 winners

The awards ceremony took place at the NATO’s Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation.

The Director of CMRE, Hank Ort (RADM), gave the certificates and prizes to the winners:

• Scenario: Long range autonomous underwater navigation.
  1st prize University of Girona, 2nd SAUC’ISSE
• Scenario: Leak localisation and structure inspection
  1st prize University of Girona, 2nd Avalon, 3rd SAUC’ISSE and 4th CISSAU
• Scenario: Underwater manipulation
  1st prize University of Girona, 2nd Avalon, 3rd CISSAU
• Scenario: Environmental survey
  1st prize Avalon, shared 2nd SAUC’ISSE / University of Girona, 4th CISSAU
• Scenario: Combined scenario
  1st prize University of Girona, 2nd SAUC’ISSE, 3rd Avalon and 4th CISSAU

At the end of the ceremony, Gabriele Ferri, technical director of euRathlon 2014, thanked the Judge Team and the Crew. The euRathlon project coordinator, Alan Winfield, thanked the teams and ONR Global, for sponsoring euRathlon 2014 prizes. He also thanked the Centro di Supporto e Sperimentazione Navale (CSSN), ECmanaged and Bq for their support and sponsorship.

Teams and attendees of euRathlon 2014 were invited to participate or attend euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge in Italy next year.

(See also euRathlon 2014 Sea competition recap: Day 1 and 2.)

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

• Six teams to participate in euRathlon 2014 sea competition next week
• Don’t build robots, build robot systems
• Winners of the euRathlon 2013 land robotics competition announced!
• euRathlon and the DARPA Robot Challenge: A difference of approach

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SV-ROS team “Maxed-Out” won the IROS 2014 Microsoft Kinect Challenge

One week before the IROS 2014 conference, I received an email from the Maxed-Out team telling me that they were using my open source code RTAB-Map for the Kinect Robot Navigation Contest that would be held during the conference. I am always glad to know when someone is using what I have done, so I said I would answer whatever questions they had before the contest. Since I was already in Chicago to present a paper, I met them in person at the conference and helped them with the algorithm on site before the contest … and good surprise, they won the contest! See their official press release here.

This contest featured robots (equipped only with a Kinect) navigating autonomously across multiple waypoints in a typical office environment. The first part of the contest was to map the environment so that the robot could plan trajectories in it. The robot was driven through the environment to incrementally create a 2D map (like a top view map of an office), using only its sensors. Sensors are not perfect, so maps can become misaligned over time. These errors can be minimized when the robot detects when it comes back to a previously visited area, a process called loop closure detection. This mapping approach is known as Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM). SLAM is used when the robot doesn’t have a map already built of the environment, and when it doesn’t have access to external global localization sensors (like a GPS) to localize itself. The mapping solution chosen by the SV-ROS team was my SLAM approach called RTAB-Map (Real-Time Appearance-Based Mapping).

In this article I share some of the technical details of the RTAB-Map.

The robot

The robot was an Adept MobileRobots Pioneer 3 DX equipped with a Kinect sensor. The up-facing camera was only used by the scoring computer (detecting patterns on the ceiling to localize the robot). The RTAB-Map ROS setup was based on the “Kinect + Odometry + Fake 2D laser from Kinect” configuration. The “2D laser” was simulated using the Kinect and the depthimage_to_laserscan ros-pkg. In this configuration, the robot is constrained to a plane (x,y and yaw).

Source: IROS 2014

Contest environment

The challenge was held in the exhibit room in the Palmer House Hotel. Since RTAB-Map’s loop closure detection is based on visual appearance of the environment, the repetitive texture on the carpet made it very challenging. When there were only discriminative visual features on the floor (like a long hall), loop closures could be found with images from different locations, thus causing big errors in the map. To avoid this problem, just two minutes before the official mapping run, we set a parameter to ignore 30% of the bottom image for features extraction. We didn’t have the chance to test it before the official mapping run – all we could do was to cross our fingers and hope that no wrong loop closures would be found!

Contest environment

Filtering visual features of the floor

Results

After mapping, no wrong loop closures were found. However, the robot missed a loop closure on the bottom of the map (because the camera was not facing the same direction), causing a wall at the end of the hall. This was one case where, when exploring an unknown environment, it would be better to occasionally do a 360° turn. This would enable the system to see more images at different angles, and would result in more loop closures. However, by using rtabmap-databaseViewer and reprocessing data included in the database, we could detect a loop closure between locations before and after exploring the hall. The result was an aligned bottom corner. There was still a misalignment on the middle-top, but given the time we had, the map was good enough for the navigation part of the contest. Below are results with these remaining errors corrected. The loop closures are shown in red.

a) After first mapping; b) Used for navigation; c) Updated results (after the challenge)

During the autonomous navigation phase, RTAB-Map was set in localization mode with the pre-built map. By detecting “loop closures” with the previous map, the robot is relocalized so it can efficiently plan its trajectories through the environment.

Updated Results

In this section, I will show a parametrization of RTAB-Map that I did after the challenge to automatically find more loop closures. The video above can be reproduced using the data here:

• RTAB-Map database: IROS14-kinect-challenge.db
• RTAB-Map parameters: IROS14-kinect-challenge.ini

You can open RTAB-Map (standalone, not the ros-pkg) using the configuration file above, then set “Source from database” and select the database above. Set Source rate to 2 Hz and press start; this should reproduce the video above. Here the principal parameters modified from the defaults:

// -Filter 30% bottom of the image
// -Maximum depth of the features is 4 meters
Kp/RoiRatios=0 0 0 0.3
Kp/MaxDepth=4

// -Loop closure constraint, computed visually
LccBow/Force2D=true
LccBow/InlierDistance=0.05
LccBow/MaxDepth=4
LccBow/MinInliers=3

// -Refining visual loop closure constraint using 
//   2D icp on laser scans
LccIcp/Type=2
LccIcp2/CorrespondenceRatio=0.5
LccIcp2/VoxelSize=0

// -Disabled local loop closure detection based on time.
// -Optimize graph from the graph beginning, to 
//   have same referential when relocalizing to this 
//   map in localization mode.
RGBD/LocalLoopDetectionTime=false
RGBD/OptimizeFromGraphEnd=false

// -Extract more SURF features
SURF/HessianThreshold=60

// Run this for a description of the parameters:
$ rosrun rtabmap rtabmap --params

The following pictures show a comparison of the results with and without loop closures:

	Odometry Only	With Loop Closures
2D Map
3D Cloud
2D Map + 3D Cloud

3D Cloud (download here: cloud.ply)

3D Cloud + 2D Map (saved with map_server: map.pgm and map.yaml)

Conclusion

SV-ROS team has created a great solution for autonomous navigation and they won the IROS 2014 Kinect Navigation Contest. I’m glad that my algorithm RTAB-Map was part of it. It was really nice to meet the team – they were very motivated, enthusiastic and all their efforts were rewarded. This post has provided a technical description of the mapping approach used by the team and shows some promising results using visual features for loop closure detection on a robot equipped only with a Kinect.