In this episode, Ron Vanderkley interviews Mark Pivac, Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of FBR (formerly Fastbrick Robotics) about the world’s first end-to-end autonomous bricklaying robot, ‘Hadrian X’. Three years after his first interview, we catch up with Pivac to see how FBR has expanded its operation and chat about their latest commercial prototype, ‘Hadrian X’, as well as the future of the robotic construction industry.
In this episode, Abate interviews Peter Harris from HighRes Biosolutions about automation in the field of drug discovery. At HighRes Biosolutions they are developing modular robotic systems that work alongside scientists to automate laboratory tasks. Because the requirements of each biomedical research laboratory are so varied, the robotic systems are specifically tailored to meet the requirements of each lab.
What do you get when you put together wood and rope? Well according to Plymouth University’s Professor Guido Bugmann: a low-cost, open source, 2 meter tall robot! All buildable for under £2000. The Cheap Arm Project (CHAP) began as an MSc project aimed at developing an affordable mobile robot arm system that could be used by wheelchair users to access daily objects at inaccessible heights or weights (the extreme case being 2 litre bottle).
Robotics is becoming more accessible for many people, but the complexities of legged robots mean they remain beyond the reach of most consumers. The complex mechanics, electronics and code algorithms make these robots much more difficult to simply get working. Four legged robots are especially difficult, they might seem very stable but simply lifting a leg up can cause the robot to fall.
QuadBot is an open-source, 3D printed robot that aims to change this.
In January 2015, Fraunhofer IPA presented a prototype of the “Care-O-bot 4” service robot. The charming helper is now proving its worth in the real world. “Paul” the robot has been greeting customers in Saturn-Markt Ingolstadt since the end of October 2016 and directing them towards their desired products.
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Hasier Larrea, Founder and CEO of Ori Systems and MSc candidate at the MIT Media Lab, about robotics used to transform personal spaces. Larrea discusses how the world is urbanizing and how new space paradigms are needed to accommodate this shift. He proposes robotic furniture that allows for what is not being used to be hidden, such as a desk or a bed. Larrea discusses the robotic systems, how these systems will be integrated into existing infrastructure, and the future or Ori Systems.
What can swarm roboticists learn from policy makers, systems biologists and physicists, and vice versa? It is already widely recognised that Robotics is an inherently interdisciplinary field and that designing even a single robot might require input from multiple domains. In Swarm Robotics, interactions between robots add further layers of complexity.
Developed by a team at the University of Toronto, mROBerTO (milli-ROBot TORonto) is designed for swarm-robotics researchers who might wish to test their collective-behavior algorithms with real physical robots. With just a 16 mm x 16 mm footprint, mROBerTO can be used in a multitude of other miniature robot projects too—its modular design allowing for easy addition or removal of components.
This is the second of two episodes where Audrow Nash interviews several companies at the International Conference for Robotics and Automation (ICRA). ICRA is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s biggest conference and one of the leading international forums for robotics researchers to present their work. The 2016 conference was May 16-21 in Stockholm, Sweden.
Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-12-02
Collective systems play very important role on Earth, and we encounter them in all sizes, scales and forms; in biological and technological areas; in ocean, air and on the ground. Examples include viruses, different colloidal systems, nano- and micro-scale particles, huge world of social insects and animals; collective systems in robotics vary from nano- up to large space exploration robots. To some extent, collective systems are ubiquitous. Such a prevalence and diversity and can be explained by several unique properties: scalability, reliability, flexibility, self-developmental capabilities. This guest lecture introduces the area of collective robotics and answers the questions “what and why”. Special attention is given to reconfigurable robotics, we discuses a big vision of “universal modularity” and several ways of its achieving.
Some interesting robots at IROS 2012
In today’s episode we focus on self-organizing systems in modular and swarm robotics with Radhika Nagpal, director of the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
September 18, 2019
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