NAO robot. Image credits: Stephen Chin on Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Created by the French company ‘Aldebaran Robotics’ in 2008, and acquired by ‘Softbank Robotics Japan’ in 2015, NAO is an autonomous and programmable humanoid robot that has been successfully applied to research and development applications for children and adults. More than 13,000 NAO robots are used in more than 70 countries around the world. Pretty much every lab working in human-robot interaction research owns a NAO making it the social robot that has been the most used in the history of the field.

In our paper ‘10 Years of Human-NAO Interaction Research: A Scoping Review’ published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, we present an overview of the evolution of NAO’s technical capabilities. We also present the main results from a scoping review of the human-robot interaction research literature in which NAO was used.

Technical overview of Nao over the years

Appearance-wise, NAO hasn’t aged a bit. The childish anthropomorphic appearance of the robot has stayed pretty much the same over the last 10 years. However, a lot of improvement has been made over the last versions of the robots.

Evolution of the NAO robot’s technical characteristic since 2008

We also note that the software environment for the robot has also improved over the years integrating new technologies and features as years passed: face recognition and tracking, semantic engine. The NAOqi API also supports various programming languages. In 2013, Aldebaran also created a developer community. This community platform allowed to share resources, behaviours and featured a forum. This has probably participated a lot in the expansion and adoption of robot with developers and researcher sharing designs of behaviours, and other games they developed with the robot.

Quantitative analysis of the scoping review

Geographical distribution of the papers included in our scoping review

The geographical distribution of authors using NAO for their research in HRI is unprecedented for a social robot. NAO has been used in more than 50 countries all around the world. And we see from the above map that the distribution is well split between North-America, Europe and Asia. But still, just like in a lot of research field the global north, tends to publish more than southern countries.

In terms of the role of the robot, researchers have investigated different application domain with the robot being used as a peer or a demonstrator in public spaces, an educational and assistant for therapists (for children with ASD, learning disability or hearing disability) being the dominant ones.

Input data (left), output data (middle), equipment (right) for each application field

As mentioned above, NAO is equipped with various sensors and actuators allowing for multi-modal interaction. Often researchers have used the robot to speak and/or make gestures. On the perception side, the robot’s limited speech recognition and poor microphone quality refrained researcher to use NLP but instead made them rely on facial, and gesture recognition. We also noted in our analysis that researchers often used external devices such as RGBD cameras or tablets in order to capture other signals allowing to assess the situation.

Qualitative results

Multiple studies reported how fun and enjoyable was the appearance of the robot. NAO is certainly not just an eye-catcher robot as its portability is highly appreciated by the researchers. NAO can be regarded as a plug-and-play robot due to its robust and easy setup characteristics. It has also been found affordable compared to other humanoid robots.

On the other side, several technical issues were reported such as low battery life and overheating issues. The speech recognition limits the interaction distance and context (i.e. noisy environments). Finally, not much embedded autonomous functionality could be used in the initial versions.

Nao’s communities

Over the years, several types of communities have formed around the NAO robotic platform.

1) Educational communities

In 2010, the University of Tokyo piloted a new educational program developed by Aldebaran Robotics that aimed to train students to use NAO. Along with some discounts to buy NAO for educational purposes, the company released some ebooks. The books and educational program cover both technical aspects of using the robot as well as more creative projects that can be given as exercise to students. The educational market certainly helped in making NAO widely used in the 2010’s.

2) Engineering communities

In 2007, the Robocup decided to use the NAO robot as the official platform for its soccer league. As detailed in the review, this led to fruitful advancement on technical capabilities of the robot such as its locomotion and vision system.

More recently, the introduction of the Pepper robot as a new platform for the robocup@Home challenge certainly can let us think that it will boost the robot’s economical life and produce more advances in social and at home tasks with the robot.

3) Research communities

Aldebaran had a strong Research & Development strategy in its early days and naturally became partner of several large European projects: ALIZ-E, DREAM, SQUIRREL, L2Tor. These strategies had the advantage to form the future researchers in the use of their platform and made NAO a dominant robot in human-robot interaction research between 2015 and 2019.

4) Industrial translation

Image from RobotLab website visited on December 20th 2021

Recently a network of start-ups has woven around the NAO robot. Providing various services such as educational workshops, therapeutic sessions, or business and marketing services, the number of these start-ups have raised these past few years (e.g. Interactive Robotics, RobotLAB and Avatarion).

Conclusion

In our review, we present a comprehensive overview on the use of NAO, which is a remarkable social robot in many instances. So far, NAO has been exposed to a challenging yet rewarding journey. Its social roles have expanded thanks to its likeable appearance and multi-modal capabilities followed by its fitness to deliver socially important tasks. Still, there are gaps to be filled in view of sustainable and user-focused human-NAO interaction. We hope that our review can contribute to the field of HRI that needs more reflection and general evidence on the use of the social robots, such as NAO in a wide variety of contexts. An implication of the findings shows a greater need for increasing the value and practical application of NAO in user-centered studies. Future studies should consider the importance of real-world and unrestricted experiments with NAO and involve other humans that might facilitate human-robot interaction.

• PAPER – 10 Years of Human-NAO Interaction Research: A Scoping Review. Amirova A, Rakhymbayeva N, Yadollahi E, Sandygulova A and Johal W. Front. Robot. AI 8:744526. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2021.744526

Mapping is an essential task in many robotics applications. A map is a representation of the environment generated from robots positions and sensors data. A map can be either used to navigate the robot that built it, or shared with other agents: humans, software, or robots. To build a map, it is frequently assumed that the positions of the robots are a priori unknown and need to be estimated during operation. Accordingly, the problem that robots must solve is known as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). This problem has been extensively studied in the past decades. As a result, a large number of methods have been developed to generate various types of maps, in different environments, and using data gathered by a broad range of sensors. However, most of these methods were conceived for single-robot systems. Multi-robot SLAM is a more recent research direction that addresses the collective exploration and mapping of unknown environments by multi-robot systems. Yet, most results so far have been achieved for small groups of robots. Multi-robot SLAM is still a growing field, and a number of research directions are yet to be explored. Among them, swarm SLAM is an alternative, promising approach that takes advantage of the characteristics of robot swarms.

A robot swarm is a decentralized multi-robot system that can collectively accomplish missions that a single robot could not accomplish alone. With respect to centralized multi-robot systems, robot swarms present unique characteristics. First, a swarm does not need global knowledge nor external infrastructure to operate, and robots in a swarm only interact with close peers and the neighboring environment. This allows robot swarms to comprise an arbitrarily high number of robots without decreasing their performance (scalability). Then, as swarms are decentralized and self-organized, individual robots can dynamically allocate themselves to different tasks and hence meet the requirements of specific environments and operating conditions, even if these conditions evolve at operation time (flexibility). Finally, a robot swarm is characterized by high redundancy resulting from the large number of robots composing it. Redundancy, together with the absence of centralized control, allows robot swarms to cope with the loss or failure of some robots, and also with noise thanks to redundancy of measurements (fault tolerance). Hence, locality of sensing and communication, self-organization, and redundancy enable desirable properties such as scalability, flexibility, and fault tolerance that make a robot swarm the ideal candidate to perform missions in large unknown environments in which the risk that individual robots fail or are lost is high.

It is our contention that robot swarms could perform SLAM in environments and under operating conditions that are not appropriate for individual robots and for centralized multi-robot systems. Indeed, the robots in a swarm can work in parallel and thus quickly cover large areas. This is especially useful in dynamic environments in which changes can occur unexpectedly. By exploring in parallel, robots could track changes in the environment, identify areas that evolve more rapidly, and autonomously allocate more resources (i.e., more robots) to these areas. Thanks to its fault tolerance, a robot swarm can also operate in dangerous environments—like sea depths or outer space—as loosing a few robots will have little impact on the mission. This is also true cost-wise as robots in a swarm are often relatively simple and cheap in comparison with other robotics systems. However, a limitation is that simple robots usually rely on low-quality sensors and therefore, at the moment, swarm systems cannot produce metric maps as precise as those produced by single robots and centralized multi-robot systems. Yet, one of the main interests of robot swarms lies in their capacity of covering quickly large areas. Hence, they are best suited for building abstract maps in time-constrained scenarios. Indeed, applications requiring a very precise map are typically not constrained by time, while time-constrained applications can cope with rough but informative maps. For example, a patrolling robot has sufficient time to build a complete map of the building it is supposed to protect before beginning its protection task. On the other hand, robots sent to explore a disaster area and to locate survivors can quickly give to the rescuers an approximate path to the victims location.

At the moment, swarm robotics research has achieved many significant results but lacks proper applications. As building maps is at the basis of many robotics behaviors, swarm SLAM is a step forward to deploy robot swarms in real world scenarios. We believe that it could play an important role in time- or cost-constrained scenarios or for monitoring dynamic environments.

Our research in swarm SLAM is supported by the European Research Council (grant agreement No 681872) and the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique–FNRS.

• PAPER – Swarm SLAM: Challenges and perspectives. Miquel Kegeleirs, Giorgio Grisetti and Mauro Birattari. Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

The ERL Emergency Robots 2017 competition consisted of four scenarios, inspired by the nuclear accident of Fukushima (Japan, 2011) and designed specifically for multi-domain human-robot teams. The first scenario is The Grand Challenge made up of three domains – sea, air, land, and the other three scenarios are made of only two domains.

The Awards, given for each scenario to the best performing teams, were introduced by Alan Winfield from Bristol Robotics Laboratory and ERL Emergency Coordinator. “The energy, enthusiasm and spirit of cooperation among the teams competing in ERL Emergency was amazing. We witnessed not only great performances from the teams and their robots, but also the drama and excitement of last minute field repairs and workarounds to the robots”, said Alan Winfield.

The Grand Challenge (Scenario 1: land, sea, and air)

After a nuclear power plant has been struck by a potent earthquake and a tsunami, it’s time for the emergency response team to act. Due to high radiation levels, the cooperation of land, sea and air robots is essential. The robots have to find as soon as possible three missing workers and deploy an emergency kit next to them. Secondly, the robots check for any structural damage of the building and to the pipes connecting the reactor to the sea for cooling purposes. In case of damaged or leaking pipes, the corresponding valves are to be closed both in the machine room and underwater to avoid radioactive contamination. Closing the wrong valves may cause a reduction in the amount of seawater available for cooling down the reactor.

1st Prize: Telerob, Germany (land) + Universitat de Girona, Spain (sea) + INESTEC/ISEP Aerial Robotics, Portugal (air)

“Our underwater robot Sparus II AUV was used to create maps of the underwater environment and to autonomously detect some targets. The algorithms developed by master and PhD students and the robustness of the platform allowed us to obtain good results even in the challenging conditions of the competition. The multi-domain competition required the coordination with the other robots (land and air), which offered us a unique opportunity for testing our communication capabilities.”, said Marc Carreras from the University of Girona.

“Autonomy was showing its advantages as well as a good situational awareness. The advanced mission documentation, which was requested in the competition, enables the first responders to get a fast and reliable situational understanding to finally reach the necessary situational ownership. The ERL Emergency competition should further focus on improving the robot-human-teaming”, said Andreas Ciossek from Telerob.

“The INESC TEC participation in ERL Emergency 2017 allowed us to validate our robotics technology in a real-world scenario with a relevant social and economical impact. Furthermore, it helped raising public awareness of the role that advanced robots can play in disaster scenarios aiding human teams in critical operations, and it confirmed once again the leading role of European robotics research”, said Eduardo Silva from ISEP/INESC TEC.

Read more about their experience here.

2nd Prize: IIS Piombino CVP, Italy (air) + Robdos, Spain, + IMM, Poland (land and sea)

3rd Prize: Raptors, Poland (air & land) + Oubot, Hungary (sea)

Survey the building and search for missing workers (Scenario 2: land and sea)

The ground and aerial robots perform a reconnaissance mission of the area and create a map of the surrounding area in order to increase the awareness of the emergency response team. Additionally, the robots find two missing workers outdoors and deploy first-aid kits near them.

1st Prize: IMM, Poland + IIS Piombino CVP, Italy

2nd Prize: Raptors Team, Poland

3rd Prize: Telerob, Germany + INESTEC/ISEP Aerial Robotics, Portugal

Pipe inspection and search for missing workers (Scenario 3: sea and air)

After the earthquake and tsunami, the pipes connecting the reactor to the sea might be leaking radioactive substances, therefore the emergency team has to find the damaged ones on land or underwater. Robots must find two missing workers: one outside the building, to whom an emergency kit should be deployed, and another one dragged by the tsunami to the sea, expected to be a casualty.

1st Prize: Universitat de Girona, Spain + INESTEC/ISEP Aerial Robotics, Portugal

2nd Prize: Tuscany Robotics Team, Italy

3rd Prize: AUV Tomkyle, Germany + HSR Search and Rescue Team, Switzerland

“Aerial robots have shown great improvements with respect to euRathlon 2015, most of them being fully operational from the first day of the competition. They have been able to quickly provide information about inaccessible areas, structural damages or other possible threats. As it happened with robots from the other two domains, aerial teams also struggled with communication issues to properly command and control their platforms. This further confirms the need for autonomous capabilities onboard the aerial robots, to become even more powerful tools for emergency response teams”, said Francisco Javier Pérez Grau from the Advanced Center for Aerospace Technologies.

Stem the leak (Scenario 4: land and sea)

The land robots have to inspect the pipes in the building’s machine room and marine robots the underwater pipes in order to close the correct valves and prevent leakage. Land and marine robots must cooperate to identify the valves and synchronize the process of closing them, by communicating directly or via their operators.

1st Prize: Telerob, Germany + Universitat de Girona, Spain

2nd Prize: Raptors, Poland + Oubot, Hungary

3rd Prize: bebot, Switzerland + AUV Tomkyle Team, Germany

Winning teams were given a diploma, prize money and in-kind, sponsored by the Platinum Sponsor IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, silver sponsors SBG systems and Texas Instruments.

In addition, Marta Palau Franco, Bristol Robotics Laboratory, ERL Emergency project manager introduced the referees’ special awards. Find out who the winners are here!

“This great event has been possible thanks to the work and effort of an amazing local organising team. Special thanks to Fausto Ferreira, the ERL Emergency 2017 Deputy Director, for his continuous support. I want to thank all the sponsors, especially our platinum sponsor IEEE OES, the project partners, referees, local associations and schools for their support. Huge thanks go to the participating teams, which were the heart of this great event. Their competitiveness pushed the robots to accomplish great results, nevertheless the competition has always been accompanied by fair play. I believe this is the perfect formula for team members to improve their professional and human skills”, said Gabriele Ferri, ERL Emergency 2017 Director.

 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.

The European Robotics League is part of the SPARC public-private partnership set up by the European Commission and euRobotics to extend Europe’s leadership in civilian robotics. SPARC’s €700 million of funding from the Commission in 2014̶20 is being combined with €1.4 billion of funding from European industry. www.eu-robotics.net/sparc

euRobotics is a European Commission-funded non-profit organisation which promotes robotics research and innovation for the benefit of Europe’s economy and society. It is based in Brussels and has more than 250-member organisations.

www.eu-robotics.net

Welcome to #ERLemergency village pic.twitter.com/wQlIHDfhJg

— Alexandre Chapoutot (@YATheChap) 15 September 2017

Robot da tutto il mondo si danno appuntamento all’#ERLemergency #Robots. A Piombino da oggi al 23/09 @ERLrobotleague https://t.co/4h1btIlln1 pic.twitter.com/7L0Lo4wTjz

— Enel Group (@EnelGroupIT) 15 September 2017

Teams worked very hard during the practice and competition days:

First tests completed by #ENSTATeam in the @ERLrobotleague pic.twitter.com/rcWQdRHAfw

— Servane Courtaux (@servane_crtx) 16 September 2017

Tuscany Robotics Team pic.twitter.com/BFo2mnb7B7

— Benedetto Allotta (@BenAllotta) 22 September 2017

Some field repairs for team Raptors @ERLrobotleague #ERLemergency while teams Oubot and Raptors continue air and sea operations. pic.twitter.com/LJ6Zphsu6Y

— Alan Winfield (@alan_winfield) 23 September 2017

Great to see many more women roboticists in #ERLemergency2017 teams than #eurathlon2015. See e.g. team #Piombino https://t.co/FsnC3e5ijN

— Alan Winfield (@alan_winfield) 25 September 2017

Land + Air day out here at #ERLemergency! @ERLrobotleague pic.twitter.com/DzZlcmnNWf

— AUVSI Foundation (@AUVSIFoundation) 20 September 2017

Robots could be found also in the exhibition area:

SWARMs at ERL 2017! #erlemergency #Piombino @SantAnnaPisahttps://t.co/ly8ciQQgh6 pic.twitter.com/anQ9Ck7knI

— SWARMs Project (@SWARMS_Project) 21 September 2017

Or enjoying the sea:

ETH Robot ANYmal likes the sea in Italy. pic.twitter.com/UsU3hUlKTD

— Roland Siegwart (@rsiegwart) 15 de septiembre de 2017

Robotics experts held presentations and demos for the general public during the Opening Ceremony in Piazza Bovio.

The Opening ceremony of #Erlemergency 2017 @ERLrobotleague has started in Piombino #robots pic.twitter.com/SGqVLGL2Xn

— euRobotics (@eu_Robotics) 17 September 2017

.@mady_delvaux: European #robotics research is performing well, robots will impact human life, #erlemergency2017 is a positive example pic.twitter.com/gciEjcS0XW

— SPARC robotics (@SPARCrobotics) 17 September 2017

The public got to know the teams,

Let’s support the #erlemergency2017 teams! pic.twitter.com/5XbsegCATB

— SPARC robotics (@SPARCrobotics) 17 September 2017

And to see some emergency robots in action with the demo of TRADR project:

Robots will complement people, not take their jobs, says TRADR project #erlemergency2017 https://t.co/K3KOP8umVN

— SPARC robotics (@SPARCrobotics) 17 September 2017

The competition site benefitted from the visit of some personalities:

Il sindaco di Piombino @massimogiu a #ERLemergency 2017 a Tor del Sale “Manifestazione positiva per la città che vuole guardare al futuro” pic.twitter.com/xMOW9zs1Hw

— Comune di Piombino (@ComunePiombino) 22 September 2017

We are delighted to have Bill Kirkwood from our Platinum Sponsor @ieeeoes at #ERLemergency2017. Many thanks for sponsoring us! pic.twitter.com/27zsP66Xsz

— ERL robotics league (@ERLrobotleague) 23 September 2017

Since they are the new generation of roboticists, children were not forgotten either: they enjoyed the free classes given by Scuola di Robotica.

Enjoy the #robotics class for children in #Piombino #ERLemergency2017 @EmanueleMicheli pic.twitter.com/1nEB4LDcEZ

— euRobotics (@eu_Robotics) 17 September 2017

At the Piombino Castle, the public attended more #robotics presentations.

Anne Bajart @RoboticsEU presented EU funded #robotics projects @CLsPlusPlus #erlemergency2017 #Piombino pic.twitter.com/RnTbCeIIl9

— ERL robotics league (@ERLrobotleague) 18 September 2017

After days of hard work, passion and enjoyment, the winners of the Grand challenge were announced:

The winners of #ERLemergency2017 Grand Challenge are Telerob+Universitat de Girona + ISEP/INESC TEC. Congratulations! pic.twitter.com/Y89BvQhJ5x

— ERL robotics league (@ERLrobotleague) 23 September 2017

Emily – short for Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard – is a remote-controlled rescue boat used by lifeguards to save people’s life at sea (Photo: Hydrolanix – EMILY robot)

This article was first published on the IEC e-tech website.

Rapid advances in technology are revolutionizing the roles of aerial, terrestrial and maritime robotic systems in disaster relief, search and rescue (SAR) and salvage operations. Robots and drones can be deployed quickly in areas deemed too unsafe for humans and are used to guide rescuers, collect data, deliver essential supplies or provide communication services.

Well-established use

The first reported use of SAR robots was to explore the wreckage beneath the collapsed twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York after the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Drones and robots have been used to survey damage after disasters such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in Japan in 2011 and the earthquakes in Haiti (2010) and Nepal (2015). Up to now, more than 50 deployments of disaster robots have been documented throughout the world, according to the Texas-based Center for Robot‑Assisted Search & Rescue (CRASAR).

Robin Murphy, head of CRASAR and author of the book Disaster Robotics, says:

The impact of earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding […] is increasing, so the need for robots for all phases of a disaster, from prevention to response and recovery, will increase as well.

Eyes in the sky

Drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), can be used to detect and enter damaged buildings, assisting rescue robots and responders on the ground by speeding up the search for survivors through prioritizing which areas to search first. The more quickly SAR teams respond, the higher the survival rate is likely to be. Rescue drones create real-time maps by taking aerial surveys and send back photos, videos and sensor data to support damage assessments.

Drones used for SAR and disaster relief are most commonly powered by rechargeable batteries and are operated autonomously through onboard computers or by remote control. Their equipment typically comprises radar and laser scanners, multiple sensors and video and optical cameras as well as infrared cameras that are used to identify heat signatures of human bodies and other objects. This helps rescuers to locate survivors at night and in large, open environments and to identify hot spots from fires. Listening devices can pick up hard-to-hear audio, while Wi-Fi antennas and other attachments detect signals given off by mobile phones and plot a map that outlines the locations of victims.

New technologies in use or development for rescue drones and robots include ways of increasing survivor detection. Sensors scan areas for heartbeats and breathing, multisensor probes respond to odours or sounds and chemical sensors signal the presence of gases.

Standards put safety first

Much of the technology used in drones comes from commodity electronics developed for consumer essentials like mobile phones. Drones also require global positioning satellite (GPS) units, wireless transmitters, signal processors and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). The flight controller also collects data from barometric pressure and airspeed sensors.

IEC International Standards produced by a range of IEC Technical Committees (TCs) and Subcommittees (SCs) cover the components of drones such as batteries, MEMS and other sensors, with an emphasis on safety and interoperability.

IEC TC 47: Semiconductor devices, and its SC 47F: Micro electromechanical systems, are responsible for compiling a wide range of International Standards for the semiconductor devices used in sensors and the MEMS essential to the safe operation of drone flights. These include accelerometers, altimeters, magnetometers (compasses), gyroscopes and pressure sensors. IEC TC 56: Dependability, covers the reliability of electronic components and equipment.

IEC TC 2: Rotating machinery, prepares International Standards covering specifications for rotating electrical machines, while IEC TC 91: Electronics assembly technology, is responsible for standards on electronic assembly technologies including components.

IEC SC 21A: Secondary cells and batteries containing alkaline or other non-acid electrolytes, compiles International Standards for batteries used in mobile applications, as well as for large-capacity lithium cells and batteries.

Ideal for isolated and remote hard-to-access areas

Using drones is useful not only when natural disasters make access by air, land, sea or road difficult, but also in isolated regions that lack accessible infrastructure. Recently, drones have started delivering medical supplies in areas where finding emergency healthcare is extremely difficult. In 2014, Médecins Sans Frontières piloted the use of drones to deliver vaccines and medicine in Papua New Guinea. In 2016, the US robotics company Ziplinelaunched a drone delivery service, in partnership with the government of Rwanda, to supply blood and medical supplies throughout the mountainous East African country. Zipline says its battery-powered drones can fly 120 km on a single charge to deliver medicine speedily, without the need for refrigeration or insulation.

Rwanda launches world’s first drone service to deliver blood to patients in remote areas of the country (Photo: Zipline)

A project by a company in the Netherlands to help refugees who get into difficulty in the Mediterranean Sea offers another example of drones being used for humanitarian purposes. Its search and rescue (SAR) drone is intended to fly over long distances, detect boats and drop life jackets, life buoys, food and medicine if necessary.

Currently only about a quarter of the world’s countries regulate the use of drones. Their deployment in disaster relief operations poses challenges involving regulatory issues, particularly when decisions are made on an ad hoc basis by local and national authorities. Humanitarian relief agencies also warn of the risks of relief drones being mistaken for military aircraft.

Two arms good, four arms better

Japan and the US lead the world in the development of rescue and disaster relief robots. Teams from both countries collaborated in recovery efforts after an earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, causing a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. While a Japanese team operated an eight-meter long snake-like robot fitted with a camera, the US contribution included two remote-controlled robots. The first was a lightweight 22 kg model previously used for bomb disposal and other military tasks before being reconfigured for disaster relief operations. The larger US model, capable of lifting up to 90 kg, was adapted from a device originally used for firefighting and clearing rubble.

Endeavor Robotics 510 Packbots are deployed in emergency situations when direct human intervention is dangerous or impossible, such as after industrial or nuclear accidents. These robots were used at the Fukushima nuclear power plant (Photo: Endeavor Robotics)

In 2017, Japanese researchers unveiled a prototype drone-robot combination for use in disaster relief work. It consisted of a vision-guided robot equipped with sensitive measuring systems, including force sensors, and a drone tethered to the robot. Four fish‑eye cameras mounted on the drone capture video of overhead views, allowing the robot’s operator to assess damage in the surrounding area.

Another Japanese rescue robot unveiled in 2017 is a multi-limbed robot that is 1,7 m tall, with four arms capable of independent operation and four caterpillar treads for mobility. Called The Octopus, it is capable of lifting 200 kg with each arm, crossing uneven terrain and lifting itself over obstacles with two arms while the other two clear debris.

Octopus, developed by Japan’s Waseda University a robot designed to clear rubble in disaster areas including nuclear facilities (Photo: Waseda University)

In the US, researchers are exploring ways in which a small and light collapsible, origami‑inspired robot, first produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), could be adapted for use as a rescue robot. The device, known as PUFFER (Pop‑Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot) is designed to pack nearly flat for transport, and then re‑expand on site to explore tight nooks and crannies which are inaccessible to larger robots.

Over and underwater too

Given that 80% of the world’s population lives near water, maritime robotic vehicles can also play an important role in disaster relief by inspecting critical underwater infrastructure, mapping damage and identifying sources of pollution to harbours and fishing areas. Maritime robots helped to reopen ports and shipping channels in both Japan and Haiti after major earthquakes in 2011 and 2010 respectively.

In the Mediterranean, a battery‑powered robotic device first developed for use by lifeguards to rescue swimmers has been adapted to help rescue refugees crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey. This maritime robot has a maximum cruising speed of 35 km/h and can function as a flotation device for 4 people.

Easy to find components and technology
Rescue robots use components and technology found in most other robots used for commercial purposes. Actuators and other electric motors, accelerometers, gyroscopes and dozens of sensors and cameras providing 360⁰ views enable these robots to maintain balance while moving over uneven ground covered with rubble or debris, and to get a sense of the environment around them.

A robot operating in a hazardous environment needs independent power and sensors for specific environments. It may be cut off from its human operator when communication signals are patchy. When remote operation guided by sensor data becomes impossible, a rescue robot needs the ability to make decisions on its own, using machine learning or other artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.

Several IEC TCs and SCs cooperate on the development of International Standards for the broad range of electrotechnical systems, equipment and applications used in rescue robots. In addition to IEC TC 47: Semiconductor devices and IEC SC 47F: Microelectromechanical systems, mentioned above, other IEC TCs involved in standardization work for specific areas affecting rescue and disaster relief robots include IEC TC 44: Safety of machinery – Electrotechnical aspects; IEC TC 2: Rotating machinery; IEC TC 17: Switchgear and controlgear; and IEC TC 22: Power electronic systems and equipment.

Where humans fear to tread
The number of disasters recorded globally has doubled since the 1980s, with damage and losses estimated at an average of USD 100 billion a year since the start of the new millennium, according to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a UK think tank. This trend is likely to lead to increased demand for unmanned robotic devices that can assist disaster relief operations on land, in the air and at sea.

Robots of all kinds play a growing role in supporting SAR teams. Increasing autonomy will create more capable ground robots, while a combination of rapid technological advances and regulation should see the market for disaster relief drones soar over the next five years.

MarketsandMarkets, a research company, estimated in October 2016 that the total global market for drones, comprising commercial and military sales, would grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 20% between 2016 and 2022 to exceed USD 21 billion. Drones designed for humanitarian and disaster relief operations will account for 10% of the future drone market, according to the US‑based Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI).

The U.S. Army is developing a drone that moves like a flying squirrel. Credit: David McNally/U.S. Army

News

A U.S. drone strike in Somalia targeted members of al-Shabab. It is the second drone strike in Somalia since President Trump relaxed rules for targeting members of the al-Qaeda-allied group. (New York Times)

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is offering refunds to drone hobbyists who paid the $5 fee to register with the agency. The move follows a federal court ruling in May that found that the FAA could not compel recreational drone users to register. The FAA has collected over $4 million in fees since it implemented the registration policy in December 2015. (Recode)

Commentary, Analysis, and Art

At the Washington Post, Greg Jaffe profiles U.S. Air Force analysts who examine video imagery from drones.

In a report published by the Mitchell Institute, Gen. David Deptula argues that the U.S. Department of Defense should create an office for unmanned aircraft to coordinate efforts across the different services. (Breaking Defense)

In Drone Warrior, Brett Velicovich and Christopher S. Stewart offer an insider’s account of running U.S. targeted killing operations. (Wired)

At Lawfare, Kenneth Anderson and Matthew Waxman present a primer on the legal and ethical debates over autonomous weapons.

At the Jamestown Foundation, Elsa Kania writes that the China is seeking to leverage recent advances in swarming drones to bolster its military.

This month’s Signal magazine includes several articles on drones and robots. (AFCEA)

At Breaking Defense, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. looks at how the lack of trust between humans and unmanned systems will inhibit the integration of robots in the future.

At the Morning Consult, Edward Graham writes that recent legislation in Congress would enable localities to have a greater say in drone regulations.

At TechCrunch, Helen Greiner discusses how robots and drones have taken on more and more roles.

At Poynter, Melody Kramer considers how recent aerial images of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on an empty beach demonstrate how drones are becoming effective newsgathering tools.

At Drone360, Lauren Sigfusson looks at how the FAA’s Part 107 waiver and authorization process has changed in recent weeks.

At Arkansas Matters, Chris Pulliam says that crop dusters are concerned about the potential threats posed to their aircraft by drones.

At DefenseNews, Burak Ege Bekdil writes that Turkey is increasingly relying on drones for border security, counterterrorism, and operations against Kurdish groups.  

At the National Interest, Samuel Bendett considers whether Russia will ever be able to catch up with the U.S. and Israel in terms of drone development.

In a letter to the editor of the Pocono Record, Pete Sauvigne argues that a local model aircraft club should not be stripped of its permission to fly in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

At The Drive, Marco Margaritoff looks at a few of National Geographic’s best drone photos of year to date. Know Your Drone

The U.S. Army is developing a drone that moves like a flying squirrel. (Popular Mechanics)

Meanwhile, the Army is developing a system that allows a single human operator to control multiple drones. (Press Release)

Defense firm Rafael has added a laser interceptor to its Drone Dome counter-drone system. (IHS Jane’s 360)

Italian firm Piaggio has resumed flight testing of its HammerHead military drone a year after the program was grounded due to a crash. (AIN Online)

Israeli defense firm Elbit has demonstrated its Seagull unmanned surface vehicle in an end-to-end mine countermeasures mission. (IHS Jane’s 360)

A group of researchers in Florida is developing an underwater drone that seeks out and collects lionfish, an invasive species in the area. (Pensacola News Journal)

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are developing a jumping one-legged robot that could eventually be used for search and rescue. (Wired)

The U.S. Coast Guard will begin evaluating different small drones with the goal of acquiring a system in 2018. (C4ISRNet)

Meanwhile, South Korea’s Coast Guard is looking to equip its offshore patrol vessels with aerial surveillance drones by 2020. (IHS Jane’s 360)

The Netherlands Aerospace Centre is testing a small jet-powered fixed-wing drone. (Unmanned Systems Technology)

Hot dog company Oscar Mayer revealed the newest addition to its WienerFleet, the WienerDrone, a hot dog delivery drone. (Fortune)

Drones at Work

An inmate who broke out of a South Carolina prison reportedly escaped using tools delivered to him by a drone. (The New York Times)

The Russian Navy is reportedly displeased with the performance of its Inspector Mk2 unmanned surface vehicle developed by French firm ECA Group. (Mil.Today)

Officials in Kaziranga National Park in India are using drones to monitor wildlife displaced by recent floods in the area. (Hindustan Times)

The Redondo Beach Police Department in California used a drone to conduct aerial surveillance during the local Independence Day celebrations. (Easy Reader News)

Meanwhile, Police in Nashville, Tennessee arrested a man for flying a drone over a large crowd during a Fourth of July celebration. (Fox 17)

The French Air Force flew one of its MQ-9 Reaper drones in civilian domestic airspace for the first time. (Aviation Analysis Wing)

Ohio has passed a law that permits ground delivery robots to operate on sidewalks. It is the fifth U.S. state to pass such a law. (Recode)

Florida governor Rick Scott signed a bill that establishes statewide regulations for drone use. (Flying Magazine)

A volunteer rescue group in Italy is using drones to look for signs of possible impending rock slides before they happen. (Motherboard)

Industry Intel

The U.S. Army awarded Assist Consultants a $18.1 million contract to build a facility for the Navy’s MQ-4C Triton at Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. (FBO)

The Department of Justice awarded AARDVARK a $51,247 contract for backpackable robots. (FBO)

Germany’s Bayer CropScience awarded SlantRange, a U.S. company that makes sensors for drones, a contract to collect data on crop breeding and research programs. (Agriculture.com)

Australia’s new Defense Cooperative Research Center will award $50 million in grants to develop autonomous capabilities for military unmanned systems. (Press Release)

The European Union selected Sensofusion, a Finnish company, to help develop a counter-drone security system. (Press Release)

Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris has contracted Aveillant to install a counter-drone system called Gamekeeper. (FlightGlobal)

Germany is pausing plans to acquire the Israel Aerospace Industries Heron military drone until after its upcoming election. (DefenseNews)

IAI has agreed to transfer drone technology to India’s Dynamatic Technologies and Elcom Systems. (IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly)

Meanwhile, Indonesia and Turkey agreed to cooperate on the development of military systems and technologies, including drones. (IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly)

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions stock prices lifted 11 percent in June, due in part to news of a sale of attritable unmanned aircraft. (Motley Fool)

The Israeli military awarded Duke Robotics, a Florida-based startup, a contract for the TIKAD, a quadrotor drone that can be armed with a machine gun or grenade launcher. (Defense One)

For updates, news, and commentary, follow us on Twitter. The Weekly Drone Roundup is a newsletter from the Center for the Study of the Drone. It covers news, commentary, analysis and technology from the drone world. You can subscribe to the Roundup here.

Conferences and trade shows, held in interesting locations around the world, can be entertaining, informative and an opportunity to explore new places, meet new people and renew acquaintances. Three recent examples: Xponential, the mostly defense-related unmanned land, sea and air show, held in Dallas; Innorobo, focused on service robotics, in Paris; and ICRA, the IEEE’s premier robotics conference, in Singapore.

ICRA

The 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the IEEE’s principle forum for robotics researchers to present their work, was held this year at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and Convention Center in Singapore. ICRA continues to have the highest number of cited research papers in the robotics field of all the various global conferences (including IROS).

In an IEEE/Spectrum review of that portion of the conference that was biomedical-related, a swallowable capsule robot capable of needle aspiration, guided by magnets, and an autonomous snake-like colonoscopy robot were two of the hits. Another reviewer found the rehab exoskeletons, haptic interfaces, modular robot components and many of the ROS-enabled solutions of merit. Overall, almost 3,000 robotics researchers attended ICRA 2017 and most found many things of interest (including Singapore and the Marina Sands Hotel).

Xponential – all things unmanned

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems Internation, AUVSI, annual trade show and conference, Xponential, held this year in Dallas, Texas, showed the changing nature of the industry and offered suggestions (guesses) as to where they were going. 170,000 visitors attended while 100 speakers and over 650 exhibitors put on this choreographed show of military weaponry, defense and security systems and equipment, and commercial unmanned air, land and sea systems.

AUVSI’s membership fees are discounted for members of the military and first responders and the exhibitor list continues to favor military/defense-related companies, but most of those companies now have a growing commercial component.

Autonomous vehicles have always been the constituency of AUVSI but with all the money flowing into autonomous car startups, and the talent search to corral people to make this new industry happen, a small portion of this Xponential show was devoted to the prospect of that future (see chart above).

The folks at The National Robotics Education Foundation (NREF) produced a gallery of over 300 interesting photos from Xponential. They also produced a special set of pictures of UAS engines from the show. Unmanned vehicles used by the military, for search and rescue, in support of agriculture and mining, for infrastructure inspection, and in a variety of other circumstances must stay aloft for long periods, hence the interest in engines that can support that amount of air time.

Innorobo

I visited Innorobo. It is a necessary show in a rapidly changing arena. Over 7,000 visitors perused an eclectic group of 170 startups, integrators, component manufacturers and service robot providers exhibiting a wide range of products and services at a site on the outskirts of Paris. Over the 3-day show, 50 speakers explored topics from robotics-related AI to philosophical discussions about law and ethics to the latest innovations in personal and professional service robotics.

The IFR (International Federation of Robotics) says that robot installations in France increased by 22% to 1,400 units in 2016 (compared to 700 units in the UK), particularly within the car industry. France ranks 2nd within the EU for robot density (the UK is 10th). Innorobo started as a show to promote France’s robotics industry (there are 225+ French companies in The Robot Report’s Directories and on our Global Map). Held in Lyon, the show grew to its present size through the hard work and willpower of a small group of inventive women entrepreneurs. It grew and relocated to Paris where it’s been for the last two years. As the focus expanded from promoting in-country robotics to displaying global innovations in robotics of the startup companies, research labs and service robot companies beginning to make inroads aroud the world – the show has become a valuable mainstay for the European press, investors, business executives, students, and roboticists alike.

Events, Directories and The Robot Report’s Global Map

From time to time it becomes relevant to toot the horn of the free resources available on The Robot Report. Our events calendar, directory of companies and educational institutions involved in the robotics industry, and the global map for job seekers and researchers alike are free and always updated.

There are still 28 robotics-related events remaining in 2017. Check them out:

• Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics, June 25-28, London, UK
• Autonomous Systems World, June 26-27, Berlin, Germany
• Conf on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing (FAIM), June 27-30, Modena, Italy
• Automation and Robotics Conference, June 28-29, San Diego, CA
• Industrial Automation Shenzhen (IAS), June 28-30, Shenzhen, China
• Forbes AgTech Forum, June 28-29, Salinas, CA
• RoboUniverse Seoul, June 28-30, Seoul, Korea
• Intl Symposium on Automation & Robotics in Construction (ISARC), June 28-July 1, Taipei, Taiwan
• China Intl Robot Show (CIROS), July 5-8, Shanghai, China
• Toward Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS), July 19-21, Guildford, UK
• RoboCup, July 25-31, Nagoya, Japan
• World Robotic Conference, August 23-27, Beijing, China
• Farm Progress Show, August 29-31, Decatur, IL
• InterDrone, September 6-8, Las Vegas, NV
• European Conf on Mobile Robotics, September 6-8, Paris, France
• Conf on Field and Service Robotics, September 12-15, Zurich, Switzerland
• RobotWorld, September 13-16, Seoul, Korea
• IEEE AFRICON 2017 and Robotics and AI, September 18-20, Cape Town, South Africa
• ROSCon, September 21-22, Vancouver, Canada
• IEEE Intl Conf on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September 24-28, Vancouver, BC, Canada
• RoboBusiness, September 27-28, Santa Clara, CA
• Drone World Expo, October 3-4, San Jose, CA
• China Industrial Automation and Robotics Show, November 7-11, Shanghai, China
• AgriTechnica, November 12-18, Hanover, Germany
• Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2017), November 13-15, Mountain View, CA
• Collaborative Robots & Advanced Vision Conf, November 15-16, San Jose, CA
• Asian Robotics Exhibition AREX, November 23-24, Singapore
• iREX 2017, November 29-December 2, Tokyo, Japan

Image: ICRA 2017

ICRA, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, is an annual academic conference covering advances in robotics. It is one of the premier conferences in its field. This year, I was invited to attend to its 2017 edition in Singapore.

With a superb organization and a beautiful location, the event included conferences of leading researchers and companies from all around the world, as well as workshops and an exhibitors area. This latter is where I spent most of my time, as I love direct interaction with the companies and research centres. Also, in this kind of academic events, compared to trade fairs, you usually have the chance to directly find technical people who are able to explain in deep detail all the ins and outs of their products.

The robotics community is not so big yet, so we still know each other. I had the pleasure to meet good friends from companies like Infinium Robotics, PAL Robotics and Fetch Robotics between others. Infinium Robotics is the company in Singapore where I work as CTO. I already wrote about this great company in one of my previous posts: “Infinium Robotics. Flying Robots“.

PAL Robotics is a company in Spain well known for having developed some of the best humanoid robots in the world. I have a very good relationship with this companies team since more than ten years ago. Great people, well motivated, well managed, that has been able to look outside of the box and enter with bravery in the world of the robotics warehouse solutions with robots like Tiago or StockBot.

Fetch Robotics is also one of the big players in the robotics solutions for warehousing industry. But I met other interesting people and had amazing chats with people from companies so key in this field as: Amazon Robotics, DJI or Clearpath Robotics. At the end of this post, there is a full list of exhibiting companies.

I saw interesting technology, like the rehabilitation exoskeletons from Fourier Intelligence (Shanghai), the Spidar-G 6DOF Haptic interface from Tokyo Institute of Technology, the Haptic systems of Force Dimension and Moog, the dexterous manipulators of Kinova, Kuka, ABB, ITRI, the modular robot components of HEBI Robotics, Keyi Technology, the D motion capture technologies of Phoenix Technologies and Optitrack, the educational solutions of Ubitech, GT Robot or Robotis and many, many others, most of them ROS enabled.

As I usually do at these events, I recorded a video of the exhibition area to provide an idea of the technologies shown there.

Last but not least, I want to thank my friends from SIAA (Singapore International Automation Association) for their kind friendship and support. They also organized also the Singapore Pavilion in this event.

Ms LIM Sue Yin, Civic Seh (both SIAA) and Alejandro Alonso (IR/Hisparob VP)

Six to ten years ago, exhibitors at Automate were promoting bin-picking in many, many booths. Bin picking wasn’t mentioned this year because it is an available option these days. For the last six years vendors have been promoting human-robot collaboration in manufacturing. Here’s what I saw this year at the big Automate and ProMat trade shows held last month in Chicago.

Chicago’s huge McCormick Place Conference Center was once again home to the Automate and ProMat trade shows: Automate for robotics; ProMat for material handling solutions. Over 900 exhibitors covered 350,000 sq ft at ProMat while 400+ companies exhibited at the Automate show.

Vendors appeared to be in the process of defining a broader definition of collaboration which includes all non-industrial robotics (mobile or stationary; manufacturing or service; professional or personal) in any way involving human-robot interaction. The interaction could be as little as different colored lights or as much as direct handling of materials back and forth to robots side-by-side on an assembly line.

Universal Robots (UR), the collaborative robot pioneer, has sold over 12,000 of their co-bots worldwide in their short career (they sold 52 in 2009). 2016 sales were 60% greater than 2015 and their goal for 2017 is 80% to 100% over 2016. UR’s booth, the biggest at Automate, was consistently crowded and noisy. Lots of attentive interest.

Recently UR added an app store for co-bot accessories, grippers and cameras. They presently offer 20 products but expect to have an additional 80 in the store by the end of 2017.

Another sign of UR’s success was the use of their robots in other vendor’s booths – 25 different exhibitors demonstrated their products with UR robots. Intelligrated used a UR to demonstrate their goods-to-picker application; Creaform used one equipped with their HandySCAN to demonstrate 3D scanning and inspection applications; ATI Industrial Automation used another UR outfitted with ATI’s multi-axis force sensor; Schunk used a UR to demonstrate their new CoAct EGP gripper (read more about this interesting gripper below) as did Robotiq, which used 3 UR’s to demonstrate their grippers, wrist cameras and force torque sensors.

Up until this year UR has had few active competitors. Most seemed to be waiting to see whether there’s a real market for these types of smaller, slower, less robust robots. They weren’t actively marketing their co-bot products.

• ABB and their two-armed YuMi (2-3 times as expensive as a UR)
• Fanuc’s CR-35iA, a green (for safe) soft-covered co-bot that can handle payloads of up to 75 pounds
• Kawada’s two-armed Nextage
• pi4 Robotics‘ Workerbots
• Kuka’s LBR iiwa which recently lowered its price to $60k
• Precise Automation’s SCARA and Cartesian desktop co-bots
• Rethink Robotics Baxter and Sawyer

UR and Rethink proved beyond doubt that there’s a willing marketplace for effective low-cost co-bot products, and the other companies are planning to take advantage of their many years of education and promotion. 2017 is the year many of the above companies – and many more new entrants – are beginning to seriously market into the industrial space. Here are some of the new co-bot entrants:

• The Aubo i5 (from the company that used to be called Smokie) looks like and has almost identical specs when compared to a UR5 except that it’s price is $10,000 less expensive and it has an open software system with ROS support.
• ABB plans to release a renamed version of the popular one-armed gomTec Roberta robot which was pulled from the market when ABB acquired gomTec.
• Bosch’s APAS which, although used internally for years is just beginning to be commercially marketed.
• Schunk’s stylish blue Powerball arm has been highlighted at every trade show so far this year.
• Denso is releasing their tiny desktop co-bot Cobotta.
• Kawasaki Robot is launching their duAro dual-arm SCARA co-bot and was using that co-bot to cone up and hand out soft-serve ice cream.
• Comau is launching their slick Racer 3 and 5 arms using their optional AURA add-on safety system.
• The highly anticipated Franka Emika $12,150 package of arm, gripper, teaching device and graphical software is already being delivered to academic clients. Commercial deliveries are expected shortly after this year’s Hannover Messe trade show.
• Staubli is launching their TX2 series of robot arms made safe by the optional use of their CS9 safety control system.
• And many more (read this article: 42 companies empowering robots and humans to work side-by-side).

Collaborative robots need safe, sensitive and flexible end-of-arm-tooling (EOAT) and there were many vendors – and some breakthrough technologies – demonstrated at the two shows. Details here: Smart grasping demonstrated at Automate and ProMat trade shows.

Back pain is one of the leading causes of work absenteeism in the UK, with 8.8 million days lost to work-related muscoskeletal disorders per year. On average, each case causes 16 days of absenteeism, and chronic conditions can cause some absences to become permanent.

But working in a bent forward, back straining posture is unavoidable in a great many professions, like in hospital, agricultural and warehouses environments to name but a few. This regular exposure to demanding postures increases the risk of debilitating pain, which can severely reduce productivity and moral in the workforce.

The Laevo Exoskeleton aims to alleviate this problem. The Laevo is a unique, wearable back-support that aids users working in a bent forward posture or lifting objects. The wearable frame carries part of the upper body weight of the user, thereby decreasing the strain on the lower back and improves the long-term employability of employees.

Video 1: The product

Video 2: See it in action

If you liked this article, you may also enjoy these:

• Python programming your NAO robot
• Robotics, maths, python: A fledgling computer scientist’s guide to inverse kinematics
• Sticky business: Five adhesives tested for 3D printing
• Meet RoboGabby: She’s on a mission to teach more girls about robotics
• Adjust how you learn and quickly pick up robotics programming

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

Code review of a C++ program with an error found.

I have been part of many software teams where we desired to do code reviews. In most of those cases the code reviews did not take place, or were pointless and a waste of time. So the question is: how do you effectively conduct peer reviews in order to improve the quality of your systems?

I found this book, Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide by Karl E. Wiegers. This book was recommended to me, and having “practical guide” in the title caught my attention —  I have reviewed other books that claimed practical, but were not. Hopefully this book will help provide me (and you) with tools for conducting valuable code reviews.

Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide. Photo: Amazon

As a human, I will make mistakes when programming; finding my mistakes is often difficult since I am very close to my work. How many times have you spent hours trying to find a bug in your code only to realize you had a bad semi-colon or parentheses? Another person who has not worked on the code for hours might have been able to spot the problem right away. When I first started programming it could be embarrassing to have somebody review my code and point out the problems. However now that I am more senior, I do not view it as an embarrassment, but as a learning opportunity since everybody has a different set of experiences that influences their code. I would encourage other developers to view it as a learning experience and not be bashful about reviews. Remember the person is critiquing the work, not you; this is how to become a better developer.

According to Wiegers, there are many types of peer reviews including: inspections, team reviews, walkthroughs, pair programming, peer desk check passaround, and finally ad hoc review.

This book is divided into three sections:

1. Cultural & social aspects
2. Different types of reviews (with a strong focus on inspection)
3. How to implement review process within your projects

Cultural & Social Aspects

In this first section of the book, the author makes the argument that quality work is not free and that “paying” the extra cost of peer reviews is a good investment in the future. By having peer review you can reduce failures before the product is released out into the world and any applicable reworks. Shifting the defect detection to the early stages of a product has huge potential payoff, due to high costs of fixing defects found late in the release cycle, or after release. The space shuttle program found the relative cost for fixing a defect is: $1, if found during initial inspection; $13, if found during a system test; and $92, to fix after delivery! In the book, the author documents various companies who saved substantial amounts of time and money all by having code inspection programs.

One thing I like is the reference to IEEE 1999, which talks about other items that are good to review. People don’t think about it but other things, such as marketing brochures, requirement specifications, user guides, test plans and many other things, are good candidates for peer review.

I have seen many project teams try to do error tracking and/or code reviews but fail, due to team culture. I saw one case where peer review actually worked: when a dedicated person’s only job was to manage reliability in the project. He was great at hounding people to track bugs and review code. This book discussed how team culture must be developed to value “quality”. If you are the type of person that does not want to waste time reviewing another’s code, you must remember you will want the other person to “waste” time looking at your code. In this manner, we must all learn to scratch each other’s back. There are also two traps to watch out for:

1. Becoming lazy and submitting bad code for review since somebody else will find/fix it, or
2. Trying to perfect your code before sharing it, in order to protect your ego from getting bruised, and to only show your best work.

We also cannot forget managers. Managers need to value quality and provide time and resources for employees to develop good practices. Managers need to understand the point of these exercises are to find flaws and people should not be punished based on those flaws. I have often seen managers not putting time in the schedule for good code reviews.

Types of reviews

Before discussing the types of reviews there is a good discussion on the guiding principles for reviews. Some of the principles are:

• Check your egos at the door
• Keep the review team small
• Find problems during review, but don’t try to fix them at the review. Give up to 1 minute for discussion of fixes.
• Limit review meeting to 2 hours max
• Require advanced preparation

There are several types of peer reviews discussed in this book. This list starts with the least formal approach and develops until the most formal approach (the book uses the opposite order which I found non intuitive).

1. Ad Hoc – These are the spur of the moment meetings where you call a coworker to your desk to help with a small problem. Usually, this just solves an immediate problem. (This is super useful when trying to work out various coordinate transforms)
2. Peer passaround/deskcheck, – In this approach a copy of the work is sent to multiple reviewers, after which you can then collate all of the reviews. This allows multiple people to look at the code/item and also lets you get something if one person does not respond. In the peer deskcheck version, only one person looks at it instead of passing it around for multiple reviews.
3. Pair Programming – This is the idea that two people program together. So while there is no official review two sets of eyes see each line of code being typed. This has an added bonus that now two people will understand the code. The downside is that often one of the coders can “doze-off” and not be effective at watching for flaws. Also, many coders might not like this.
4. Walkthrough – This is where the author of the code walks through the code to a group of reviewers. This is often unstructured and heavily dependent on how good of a job the author prepared. In my experience this is good for helping people understand the code and finding large logic flaws, but not so much for finding smalls flaws/bugs.
5. Team Review – This is similar to the walkthrough however reviewers are provided with documentation/code in advance to review and their results are collated.
6. Inspection – Finally, we have the most formal approach which the author appears to favor. In this approach the author of the code does not lead the review, rather, a moderator, often with the help of checklists, will lead the meeting and read out the various sections. After the moderator reads a section, the reviewers discuss it. The author of the code can answer questions and learn how to improve various sections. Often the author might identify other instances of the same problem that the reviewers did not point out. An issue log should be maintained as a formal way of providing feedback and a list to verify fixes against.

Suggested review methods from “Peer Reviews in Software”

The book then spends the next few chapters detailing the inspection method of peer review. Here are just a few notes. As always, read the book to find out more.

• In most situation 3-7 is a good size group for the inspection. The number of people can be based on the item being reviewed.
• The review needs to be planned in advance and have time to prepare content to distribute to reviewers.
• After the meeting the author should address each item in the issue log that was created and submit it to the moderator (or other such person) to verify that the solutions are good.
• Perform an inspection when that module is ready to pass to the next development stage. Waiting too long can leave a person with a lot of bad code that is now too hard to fix.
• You can (sort of) measure the ROI by looking at the bugs found and how long they took to find. There are many other metrics detailed in the book.
• Keep spelling and grammar mistakes on a separate paper and not on the main issue list.

How to implement review processes within your projects

Getting a software team and management to change can be difficult. The last part of this book is dedicated to how you can get reviews started, and how to let them naturally grow within the company. One significant thing identified is to have a key senior person act as a coordinator for building a culture of peer review and to provide training to developers. There is a nice long table in the book of the various pitfalls that an organization may encounter and how to deal with them.

This book also discusses special challenges and how it can affect your review process. Some of the situations addressed are:

• Large work products
• Geographic or time separation
• Distributed reviewers
• Asynchronous review
• Generated and non-procedural code
• To many participants
• No qualified reviewers available

At the end of this book, there is a link to supplemental material online. I was excited to see this. However when I went to the site, I saw it was all for sale and not free (most things were around $5). That kind of burst my bubble of excitement for the supplemental material. There is a second website for the book that is referenced but does not seem to be valid anymore.

Throughout the book the idea is getting proper training for people on how to conduct inspection reviews. Towards the end of the book, the idea of hiring the book’s author as a trainer to help with this training is suggested.

Overall, I think this is a good book. It introduces people on how to do software reviews. The use of graphics and tables in the book are pretty good. It is practical and easy to read. I also like how this book addresses management and makes the business case for peer reviews. I give this book 4.5 out of 5 stars. The missing 0.5 stars is due to the supplemental material not being free and for not providing those forms with the book.

Disclaimer: I do not know the book author. I purchased this book myself from Amazon.

I recently had a chance to view Automata and wanted to share my thoughts on the movie based upon the current and future state of robotics and artificial intelligence. As a film, this was a tough one to sit through, and won’t make any must-see lists from me. Unless you’re really into Antonio Banderas, I’d skip this. My deep interest in robotics was the only reason I struggled to the end.

From a technology standpoint the film’s underlying premise – that robots seeking to repair themselves have a consciousness – is not as simple as it would seem. While there is no universal test for self-awareness, like a Turing or mirror test, the film seems to suggest that if a robot seeks to self-repair or self-mutilate, it shows it has at least some level of consciousness. But I see this as problematic: to me, self-repair is simply a good algorithm, something we see regularly in the process automation industry, for example when a system clears a jam, or adjusts to a flow rate due to over- or under-loading.

In fact, in May 2014, Dextre and the Canadarm became the first robotic system to self-repair on board the International Space Station. Measured by this standard, the future has already arrived – but I’m not so certain robots will be taking over the earth any time soon. And even if I’m wrong, and the Canadarm seeks to become a human overlord, we still have a 200+ miles and a seriously hot re-entry to buffer us.

For another example, take NAO or the soon to be released Pepper by Aldebaran: by recognizing facial expressions they can estimate human emotion. Is that a sign of intelligence, or just another really good algorithm? Research into human-robot interaction often concludes that people believe they have formed emotional connections with robots. Soldiers frequently develop emotional relationships with their robot companions. Are these human feelings a sign of robot consciousness? No! Are they a sign of robot intelligence? Not really. Most of these machines are tele-operated and are extensions of the soldier, providing him with some added abilities (like infrared vision) and protection (distance from a blast perimeter).

Automata does end with a philosophical premise that as the human population on earth diminishes, robots evolve to carry the torch and recolonize earth. When we end, they begin. Perhaps that is where the movie should have started.

Alex Garland’s first feature film as a director, Ex Machina, had its US debut at SxSW on March 14. This stylish idea film explores the Turing Test in a very Pinteresque fashion as a young coder falls in love with an advanced AI. Ex Machina is beautifully framed, but Garland’s stark script succeeds on the strength of the acting from Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander and Oscar Isaac.

Garland’s writing career launched in 1997 with the best selling novel “The Beach”, which the Times called the Gen X answer to Lord of the Flies. After a string of cult successes like 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd and drafts of Halo and Logans Run, Garland became fascinated with the emerging promise and perils of AI. In the Q&A following the SxSW screening, Garland talked about feeling a zeitgeist, a technological and cultural turning point, compelling him and other film makers and writers to address robots and artificial intelligence.

Although Garland says that he’s on the side of the robots, it’s an uneasy truce. Garland describes his film as the story of ‘two brains torturing each other’. That’s true. In Ex Machina, Tony Stark meets John Searle in a gripping drawing room theater, when a billionaire tech genius recruits a young coder to administer the Turing Test to his secret advanced embodied AI.

And it’s a stark film, there are only 4 characters; 2 men and 2 women. 2 AIs and 2 humans. And which two are the brains? That is supposed to be uncertain, but anyone who has used the Bechdel Test to analyze films or popular culture for gender issues knows exactly where the ‘brains’ are.

The Bechdel Test started as a gender litmus and has become a remarkably useful indicator of power imbalance. The test is named after Amy Bechdel, a cartoonist who outlined the rules in a 1985 cartoon. To pass the Bechdel Test, a film has to have two women in it, who talk to each other, about something other than a man .

Sometimes the proviso is added that the women have to have names, because some films can have many women characters, but if the characters are all “girl at checkout” and “girl with gun” then they are just devices to add color or move the action forward. And of course, possession of a name is an important indicator of personhood, or identity awareness, so it’s always one of the first steps to separate the beings from the machines.

Many films seem at first glance to have badass female characters, but when put to the Bechdel Test, it becomes clear that they never talk to anyone but the main man, or if they talk to each other, it’s about the main male characters. So really, they have no interiority, no self awareness and are probably going to fail a Turing Test. That’s where I think it would be very interesting if the Turing Test were to meet the Bechdel Test more often.

Garland is also playing games with gender and the alienness of AI in Ex Machina. There is a beautiful scene where Ava, the AI, performs a reverse strip tease, putting on her human body.

But I’m afraid that Ex Machina falls at the final fence, as does just about every other science fiction film I’ve ever seen, aside from Alien. The Bechdel Test is useful for more than examining gender representation. It can be our Turing Test for creating believable alien or artificial life forms. If you look at our filmic or cultural representations of the other or alien, then you have to be struck by the singular nature of them all. From Frankenstein to Big Hero 6, do they have any reality without the central human characters?

No – they are alone. Even Alien is alone. At least in Frankenstein, it is the utter aloneness of the new form that is the whole story. Films that have pushed the envelope are few. And doing a quick mental check, I was left feeling empathy for the ‘others’ in only a couple, like Westworld, BladeRunner and Planet of the Apes, and the books of writers like Brin and Cherryh.

How believable are our ‘other’ AIs and robots? Brad Templeton said that an autonomous vehicle isn’t autonomous until we tell it to go to the office and it decides to go to the beach instead. A life outside of our anthropomorphic story is what’s missing from our AIs, aliens and others. We don’t really care about them or their lives outside of their impact on our own. And this makes us poorer.

The final shot is a haunting homage to Plato’s Cave’ – although Garland credits his Director of Photography entirely for it. In The Republic, Plato posed the question: what if humans were born chained to face a cave wall seeing the world only as the shadows passing in front of a fire behind them in the mouth of the cave? Imagine the difference when you see the world, unchained from the cave.

I can’t say more. Go see Ex Machina. And use the Bechdel Test on everything.

https://youtu.be/XYGzRB4Pnq8

This is Kidbotics, a new educational robotics review series for kids who, like me, are just coming into the robotics scene.  I am 12 years old, and these reviews are meant to give kids (and their parents and teachers) a sense of whether these will make a fun introduction to robotics for kids with minimal experience. Today we are looking into the depths of the ThymioII, a wonderful little robot by Mobsya with some really great things going for it. 

Check out Thymio’s crowdfunding campaign for a wireless version!

I developed five simple criteria for judging educational robots based on factors that are most important to kids: 

1. Did I have fun? Let’s face it: Kids want just want to play. I’ll be looking for entertainment value and how many hours of fun the kit can provide.
2. Did I learn something? Honestly, kids don’t really care about learning stuff as much as they care about having fun, but teachers and parents care about the educational value a lot, so I’ll be looking at whether the kits taught me something new.
3. Did I have to ask for help? We kids feel good when we can do things by ourselves. Having to go to an adult every five minutes for help is a downer, so I’ll be looking at how much adult help I needed to assemble and program the kits.
4. Can I build it without special tools or equipment? It’s annoying to plan an afternoon of tinkering only to find out that you don’t have everything you need on hand. Just like having to ask for help, having to go out with a parent to buy special equipment can slow a kid down. I’ll be looking to see whether the kits can be assembled with tools that can be easily found around the house.
5. Is it affordable? Most kids I know don’t have much money. Is it something a kid could buy for themselves? Is it something a parent or grandparent could afford to buy as a gift? I’ll be looking at how well the kit is priced in relation to the number of hours of fun I get out of it.

Was it fun?

First things first, I will talk about the most important factor – was it fun? – because kids will choose fun over education any day. And the answer here is definitely yes.

What I love about the ThymioII is the fact that it is easy to use. It works right out of the box. I even turned it on accidentally while unpackaging it – that’s how simple it is to get started. The ThymioII has a variety of pre-programmed functions (like following your hand or a black line), that start right away when you turn it on, without even having to program and upload any behaviours. This makes the ThymioII potentially lots of fun even for very young kids who aren’t yet into programming.

You can also program in a variety of advanced actions through the visual editor, which is very simple to use and comes with a good getting started guide. There is also a good Help button in the visual editor that takes you to the right place on the Mobsya website for support.

Within about ten minutes, I was able to modify one of the basic starter functions that allows the ThymioII to turn away from objects in front of it. My modification allowed the ThymioII to find an object, move towards it and then circle around it, before moving on to find another object and then repeating the behaviour.

More advanced kids can write code line by line with a normal code editor or with the official Mobsya Visual Programming Language built specifically for the ThymioII, which I think is a smart move seeing that the integration makes it that much simpler and easier to use. 

The range of ways you can interact with the ThymioII behaviours – from just playing with pre-programmed functions, to visual programming, to line-by-line coding – makes it potentially fun for a lot of different ages. My two-and-a-half year old sister was able to play with this and have TONS of fun with the basic functions and chasing it around, while I was able to explore the advanced features. 

Kids really like to build super mega machines. Though Mobsya doesn’t officially say that the ThymioII is Lego compatible, there are knobs on it that would let you attach Lego bricks, and slots where you could insert Technic axles – so you can use the ThymioII as a base for building. One thing that would make the ThymioII even better would be if there were official add-on components like arms or legs that could be programmed and would let you learn more about mechanics and moving parts.

Did I learn something?

Was this little robot educational? Yes. The ThymioII taught me about code, motors, light and motion sensors, and a whole slew of other things.

For example, while tinkering around with ThymioII in a very dark room, I learned that light sensors don’t just detect light in bright environments, but they are also very useful for low light environments. I was playing with it in my room with the lights off and the windows completely covered, and from my perspective the room was pitch black and I couldn’t see a thing. But the ThymioII could see objects from a good distance away and know to stay away from them, even when I couldn’t and kept crashing into walls. I programmed the ThymioII to blink its LEDs and turn when it got close to the wall, so I could use it as an object detector to help me find my way around in the dark.

I also learned a lot about coding. The Visual Programming Language was helpful because when I dragged the behaviour icons around, I could see the actual lines of code change in the editor. It was nice to have a visual connection between the lines of code and the behaviour blocks so I could figure out how to write code myself.

The ThymioII also has a lot of different sensors, so when you start programming you have a lot of options. The nice thing about this is that I never got bored, so that gives ThymioII the stamp of “Not Boring” approval when it comes to education. 

The videos below show some of the project ideas you can do with the ThymioII, and you can see again how these might fun for kids of different ages.

Did I have to ask for help?

I turned it on accidentally while taking it out of the box. That is how well it works and how simple it is.

Somehow I was able to get through my entire ThymioII experience without asking for help even once (surprising, I know). All I really have to say on this topic is that, with everything so well laid out and easy, and with all the simple but effective buttons and coding options, it is not surprising that I was able to get through experimenting and programming the ThymioII without once feeling like I had gotten in over my head.

Can I build it without special tools or equipment?

Like the previous section, there’s not a lot to say here. Were expensive tools needed? Very simply put, no. If you have power, a computer, and about three hours of free time, then there is nothing else you need.

Is it affordable?

You can buy the ThymioII from Mobsya’s US distributor for $189, from their EU distributor for 108,99€, or direct from Mobsya for Fr.119.00 (click here to see their distributors list).

This may sound like a lot money if you’re a kid like me, but ThymioII pays for itself in terms of value. While it is true that there are cheaper kits out there, there are more expensive ones as well. The ThymioII seems to compare well to similar robots in the same price range. It has high quality parts (even my kid sister didn’t break it), was fun to program, and should be fun for kids of a lot of different ages. For that reason I think it’s priced very fairly.

I also found out while writing this review that Mobsya is actually a non-profit, and so I guess I shouldn’t expect anything less than good value from them. If you put it on your holiday shopping list this year, I think all your kids will be glad.

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

• 25 holiday gift ideas for RoboGeeks (2014)
• Taking your first steps in robotics with the Thymio II
• Robots Podcast: Educational robotics
• Robots Podcast: Origami robots
• Drones for Schools
•  My pathway to robotics
• Getting into the driver’s seat: Girls of Steel tell us how they got hooked on FIRST and robotics

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

The Economist, a prestigious London-based business magazine zealously read around the world, has a 14-page Special Report in their current issue. ‘Rise of the Robots’ offers insight into why robotic technology is so fascinating and so prevalent in the media. The reporter, Oliver Morton, a briefings editor for The Economist, traveled around the world and spent months developing information for the report and ended it with the tagline: “They are coming to work and play among us in ever greater numbers.”

One of his trips was to the DARPA Robotics Challenge trials in Florida last year. He places the various devices, inventions and needs in perspective – and for this alone it is worth purchasing the magazine. The report is organized as follows:

• Immigrants from the future – robots offer a unique insight into what people want from technology. That makes their progress peculiarly fascinating
• The build-up – after slow beginnings, a big push in robotics now seems imminent
• Military uses – drones will change war – and more
• Business service robots – the best robot technology is unseen
• Labor markets – job destruction by robots could outweight creation
• Domestic service robots – a robot around the house doesn’t just have to be handy; it has to be likeable too
• Regulation – robots are as good, or as bad, as the people who make them

In a brief interview with The Economist Digital Editor Tom Standage, Oliver Morton gives an outline of the report and some of his conclusions – including that the rise of robots is… cool!

UPDATE: New video of a collaborative, cloud-based mapping experiment. Mapping is essential for mobile robots and a cornerstone of many more robotics applications that require a robot to interact with its physical environment. It is widely considered the most difficult perceptual problem in robotics, both from an algorithmic but also from a computational perspective. Mapping essentially requires solving a huge optimization problem over a large amount of images and their extracted features. This requires beefy computers and high-end graphics cards – resulting in power-hungry and expensive robots.

Update

Here is a video of a collaborative mapping experiment using Rapyuta, the open source cloud robotics framework. Instead of just compressing each frame of the stream, we now run a dense visual odometry algorithm to produce keyframes and these keyframes are eventually sent to the cloud for optimization. This technique is a very natural way to compress since keyframes are produced only when the robot has moved a certain distance or angle. The Cloud, in addition to optimization, now also does merging of maps produced by multiple robots. The code is open under the Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/rapyuta/rapyuta-mapping.

Together with our RoboEarth colleagues Dominique Hunziker, Dhananjay Sathe, Mayank Singh, we have set up an inexpensive, light weight robot so that it can perform full 3D mapping in real-time by offloading heavy computation to the RoboEarth Cloud Engine (nickname: Rapyuta) (see previous Robohub article). In the video below Master student Vlad Usenko shows how robots can sidestep this problem.

How it works
What actually happens here? As you can see from the video and the figure below, the robot is equipped with an RGBD sensor (ASUS Xtion PRO), an ARM-based single board computer (Odriod-U2), and an off-the-shelf wireless dongle. The robot transmits RGB images (QVGA resolution) and depth images (QVGA resolution) at 30 FPS to Rapyuta with a frame by frame compression (JPEG for RGB, and PNG for depth images). The single board computer is only used for compression, communication, and low-level control of the robot – the heavy computation all happens off-board. The optimized map shown at the end of the video is built by manually triggering the optimization process in the cloud after the demo (i.e., not in real time).

The main purpose of this demonstrator is to showcase that today’s wireless technologies allow robots to outsource computationally heavy data processing to the cloud. As shown in the figure below, and as I’ve laid out in an earlier article on Cloud Robotics, bandwidth is a key driver for cloud-based robot services and applications.

Most actual mapping scenarios call for a slightly different split in work-load: You’d want to perform visual odometry locally and only send keyframes to Rapyuta for global optimization. The good news is that we already supports this setup: Rapyuta provides the corresponding software packages to run on ODroid boards along with the necessary cloud computing infrastructure.

What’s next?
This demonstration stops short of actually using the data returned from the cloud: A map is created and available in real time, but not actively used to control the robot. Using the map to control the robot, e.g. to improve exploration, is one logical extension.

Another natural next step would be to use the computational resources in the cloud for localizing in an existing map. Imagine a robot entering a new building and trying to get its bearings. Such localization in an existing map requires performing a search over the entire map – essentially a very large set of images and their features – to find the best match between what the robot is seeing now and a part of the map.

But the cloud can be used to do much more interesting things than improve single robot navigation. Multiple robots can instantaneously share their maps, so applications like multi-robot mapping become much easier. This implies using the cloud as more than a pure computational resource – it becomes a medium to store, share, and collectively improve data. This is interesting for static scenes, but things get even more interesting for dynamic scenes, for example when multiple robots track dynamic objects in the map. With WIRE, some of my RoboEarth colleagues have developed algorithms to do just that. We are currently working on integrating this functionality with Rapyuta and the RoboEarth database and will make it available as a Rapyuta cloud service later this year.

Many of the key advantages of using this Cloud Robotics approach to mapping will only become apparent when maps are brought together with the vast amounts of knowledge required to understand environments. Performing mapping in the cloud not only allows the creation of maps but also the ability to understand them: By bringing computation close to the knowledge required to make sense of all of a robot’s sensor information, Cloud Robotics offers robots a very powerful way to understand the world around them. When working together, cloud computing frameworks like Rapyuta and online knowledge bases like RoboEarth can allow us to make robots that are both smart and inexpensive.

Additional information
For further information, see:

• Technical details and tutorial for this setup (available early July)
• Video of recent live Cloud Robotics Mapping demo at ROSCon 2013
• Cloud Robotics Workshop at IROS 2013 in November, Tokyo
• Homepage of the RoboEarth Cloud Engine (codename “Rapyuta”)
• RoboEarth homepage

Questions?
Feel free to post in the comments below.

2022 update: A new, one-wheeled version of the Cubli has been developed. The one-wheel Cubli is a three-dimensional pendulum system that can balance on its pivot using a single reaction wheel, as it is shown in this article.

2014 update: My colleagues at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich have created a small robotic cube that can autonomously jump up and balance on any one of its corners .

This latest version of the Cubli (2014) can jumping up, balance, and even “walk”. This new version is self contained with respect to power and uses three slightly modified bicycle brakes instead of the metal barriers used in the previous version. We are currently developing learning algorithms that allow the Cubli to automatically learn and adjust the necessary parameters if a jump fails due to the deterioration of the brakes and changes in inertia, weight, or slope of the surface.

This robot started with a simple idea:

Can we build a 15cm sided cube that can jump up, balance on its corner, and walk across our desk using off-the-shelf motors, batteries, and electronic components?

There are multiple ways to keep a cube in its balance, but jumping up requires a sudden release of energy. Intuitively momentum wheels seemed like a good idea to store enough energy while still keeping the cube compact and self-contained.

Furthermore, the same momentum wheels can be used to implement a reaction-torque based control algorithm for balancing by exploiting the reaction torques on the cube’s body when the wheels are accelerated or decelerated.

Can this work?

The first step in creating the robot, therefore, was to look at the physics to figure out if a jump-up based on momentum wheels was possible. The image below shows some of the math to figure out the Moment of Inertia (MOI) of the wheel and full cube.

This mathematical analysis allowed a quantitative understanding of the system which allowed to inform design choices, such as the trade offs of using three momentum wheels vs. a design with a momentum wheel mounted on each of the six inner faces of the cube.

Another outcome of this analysis was a good understanding of the required velocities of the momentum wheel to allow the cube to jump up, and the torques required to keep the cube in balance. Both factors were critical for the next steps: Determining the required hardware specs.

Specs and hardware design
Given the required velocities and torques determined above, it was clear that the momentum wheel’s motor and gearbox would be a major challenge for creating the robot. Using the mathematical model allowed to systematically tackle this problem by allowing a quantitative analysis of the trade-offs between higher velocities (i.e., more energy for jump-up) and higher torques (i.e., better stability when balancing).

This mathematics-driven hardware design resulted in detailed specs for the robot’s core hardware components (momentum wheels, motors, gears, and batteries) and allowed a CAD design of the entire system.

Part of this step was the design of a special brake to suddenly stop a momentum wheel to transfer its energy to the entire cube and cause it to jump up.

The photo to the left shows an early design of this brake, consisting of a screw mounted on the momentum wheel, a servo motor (shown in black) to move a metal plate (in blue) into the screw’s path (in light brown), and a mounting bracket (in light brown) to transfer the momentum wheel’s energy to the cube structure. The current design uses a combination of hardened metal parts and rubber to reduce peak forces.

2D prototype
To validate the mechanics and electronics of the jump-up and balancing strategy and prove feasibility of the overall concept a one-dimensional version was built:

The results obtained with this 2D version of the cube were published in an IROS 2012 paper.

The final robot
Following successful tests with the 2D version, a full robot was built. The result is Cubli, a small cube-shaped robot, named after the Swiss-German diminutive for “cube”.

As you can see in the video, Cubli can balance robustly.

However, first jump-up tests showed that the stress resulting from a sudden braking of the momentum wheel led to mechanical deformations of the momentum wheels and aluminium frame. This made repeated jump-ups of the whole Cubli impossible without part replacement. It was therefore decided to tweak the structure and breaking mechanism to reduce the mechanical stress caused by the jump-up.

In addition to balancing, my colleagues are now investigating the use of controlled manoeuvres of jumping up, balancing, and falling over to make the Cubli walk across a surface.

Note 1: This post is part of our Swiss Robots Series. If you’d like to submit a robot to this series, or to a series for another country, please get in touch at info[@]robohub.org.

Note 2: This work was done at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zurich, Switzerland and was funded in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), grant number 146717.

Note 3: If you have questions, post them below and we’ll post answers.

Some more photos:

Thanks Gajan!

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

• Insect-inspired flying robot handles collisions, goes where other robots can’t
• The Distributed Flight Array: Modular robots that self-assemble, coordinate and take flight
• Designed to mingle: Rezero ballbot’s smooth moves can handle a crowd

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

DEMO describes itself as the launchpad for emerging technology and trends. The DEMO Fall 2013 Conference was produced by IDG, the publishing giant of Computerworld, PC World, MacWorld, etc. I went to see the 40 start-ups presenting their new products and apps, searching for anything robotic, and interested in everything else that might be trendsetting. Videos of all 40 presentations can be seen here.

Erick Schonfeld, the Executive Producer of DEMO, prepped us that this DEMO show would reflect five big trends:

1. Mobile is the interface to the real world
2. Cloudware is getting serious
3. Control your data and you can control your health
4. These aren’t your dad’s productivity apps
5. Hardware is the new software

The format for DEMO was that each of the start-up companies would get four minutes to present and demonstrate their idea and outline their business plan. Start-up presentations were grouped by the five categories shown above. A panel of three experienced VCs (or previous start-up executives) knowledgeable about that category would critique and ask core questions.  Each presenter had a booth in an exhibition hall for further discussion and funding questions. In between these presentation sessions were “Founder School” and “Executive Briefs” sessions to share insights from successful start-ups from the past.

One of those Executive Briefs was particularly interesting to me because it emphasized the need to focus on the needs of the user rather than the brilliance of the product. Jody Holtzman, a spokesman for the AARP – that’s right, the Association of American Retired Persons – asked everyone: “What’s your 50+ strategy?” His point was simple: if you are in the consumer products business, what’s your strategy to address the 106 million Americans that spend over $7 trillion annually? He went on to offer a series of pdf and infographics that describe the needs of this large and growing population.

Each of these 9 areas are detailed in a free report.

An example of the depth of thought in the AARP materials can be seen in the Diet & Nutrition section. Dietary tracking partnered with fitness measurement systems and healthy-eating grocery delivery services are one such suggestion. DEMO presenters nibbled at the edges of these AARP suggestions with apps like Pictrition, which attempts to gamify the process of losing weight. Pictricion “leverages the powerful mechanics of a food journal, but without having to tediously write down every detail of your diet. Just take pictures of the food you eat throughout the day and health conscious people like you will rate how healthy they think it is. Get more points for eating healthier food and compete with friends and family.” The app is predicated on research showing that the biggest and most sustained weight losses occur when patients journaled their daily intake.

Perhaps a more relevant DEMO presenter was Hello Doctor, an app created from personal need. It collects scanned images of medical reports of all types and parses for keywords and then tags and digitally files them. If you query HDL you get a chart of all lab reports by date each linked to the original report. It replaces the folders full of medical and insurance records that patients often clutch in waiting rooms and at home as they research their conditions online.

Bounce Imaging displayed a low-cost disposable throwable 360º camera with audio and sensing capability. Unlike Recon Robotics‘ Scout Throwbots which remotely-controlled-move once thrown into an area under surveillance, Bounce’s Explorer captures it’s images on the fly – in the air and on the ground. The Explorer has a shock-absorbing shell embedded with six cameras, plus clusters of near-infrared LEDs to light up dark rooms for the cameras. It immediately begins taking photos and testing for methane, carbon monoxide, and dangerously high temperatures. A microprocessor inside the ball then stitches the photos together and converts the raw data for transmission over wifi. Just seconds after the toss, a wrap-around panorama—complete with environmental warnings—appears on the synced tablet or smart device.

One more start-up with good prospects was Skully Helmets. Their smart motorcycle helmet goes way beyond head protection.  The Skully P1 has a heads-up display which shows 180º of the scene behind the rider as well as simple turn-by-turn GPS maps using onboard optics, cameras, sensors and microprocessors.

Like many children who show an early interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), my childhood years were spent constructing Lego masterpieces and deconstructing household electronics. My introduction to the world of robotics came through my parents, who opened one of the first robotics online-shops in Australia in order to support my interests. Inspired, I spent the next few years of my life playing with Lego Mindstorms, hexapods and Basic-Stamps, and running a “Robot Wars” competition with my best friend.

My interest during these years was not in the mechanics, but rather in the software and electronics that controlled the robots. This interest lead me to study computer systems engineering at a bachelor level. During this degree, I entered local robotics competitions and quickly realized that, in order to further my interest in robotics, I needed a better understanding of mechanics and control systems – a direction that I followed in my masters degree, and have since continued as a PhD student under the supervision of Professor D’Andrea, whom you may remember from his TED talk on Machine Athleticism.

Over the last few months, largely in response to this TED talk, I and my colleagues at Robohub and the Flying Machine Arena have received many emails from interested students and hobbyists asking us “How do I get started with robotics?”

My first contact with “robots”; this fascination has since lead me into an academic pathway into the field.

To begin to answer this, we first need to dive a little deeper and address the questions “what is robotics?” and “what is a robot?”

Asking the general public, I received answers varying from “manufacturing” and “smart vacuum cleaners” to “intelligent machines capable of making their own decisions”. As a robotics researcher, I define robotics to be the field at the intersection of mechanics, electronics, mathematics, programming and algorithms, and a robot to be a dynamic (capable of moving) device that can sense and interact with its environment by using a combination of mechanics, electronics and software.

The fact is, robotics means different things to different people, and this makes getting started a difficult task, regardless of age, education or prior experience – there is no one-size-fits-all answer!

To help guide curious and aspiring minds of all ages and backgrounds, Robohub will be running a two week focus series on how to get started in robotics. This series will consist of hands-on tutorials and discussions about educational pathways, as well as personal “getting started” stories and advice from roboticists, hobbyists and robotics students. These will be complemented by a closer look at some high-profile robotics projects, in order to highlight how mechanics, electronics, mathematics, programming and algorithms work together to produce a robotic system.

Interested in contributing to the focus series? We’d like to hear from you.

SUSBEXPO is the first conference about unmanned systems to really focus on the growing commercial opportunities of this market. AUVSI put on a spectacular annual show, but it is predominantly military systems. SUSBEXPO is the brain child of Patrick Egan, who is a UAS business consultant, as well as being deeply involved in AUVSI, SUASNews, building on a background with the military and regulatory groups. The conference was held at the Golden Gate Club in San Francisco on July 25-26 and attracted attendees from all over the US and beyond. UAVs were on exhibit from companies like 3D Robotics, AgriFlight and MLB Drones, and Patrick Egan is expecting SUSBEXPO to be even larger next year.

The two day speaker list was jam packed with names that few of us have heard of … yet. The conference was also multidisciplinary, attracting end users of drones/unmanned systems, service providers, lawyers, journalists, ethicists and investors. Investment into potentially commercial drone companies is starting to take off: Airware raised $10.7 million in their Series A round from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, RRE Ventures, Lemnos Labs and Promus Ventures; 3DRobotics raised $5 million in a Venture round from True Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Chris Michel; and Drone Deploy not ready to announce yet, but were the hit of Angel Pad incubator’s recent Demo Day, and the company was founded by exGoogle machine learning PhDs. As Bruce Park from Agriflight said when he opened the expo, “It’s like being in Steve Jobs’ garage. It might look like a hobby to some people but it’s about to become a revolution.”

Speakers on Day One included Gretchen West, the Executive Vice President of AUVSI, who talked about the challenges of firefighting the recent surge of negative local drone legislation, like the bounty for drone hunting proposed by one Texas town. West has found that at both the federal and state level, the primary legislative focus is on privacy, but as cameras (and now phones) are everywhere these days, we need to talk about the whole issue of privacy and not the devices. “It’s not the platform that should be legislated.”

Eileen Shibley from the California UAS Portal talked about the pathway towards becoming one of the 6 FAA UAS test sites, which has included becoming a hardware business incubator with rapid prototyping and manufacturing facilities to extend the Portal’s utility for both clients and the community around Inyokern Airport. Jonathan Downey, Airware CEO, saw the increasing pressure for commercialization as an opportunity to create responsive and accessible cross platform UAS software, disrupting the costly inflexible blackbox autopilots generated by a military chokehold on UAV business.

ITAR – the elephant in the room

At the moment, unmanned system business is shaped by the triumvirate of military funding, the slow path towards an FAA certification system and ITAR, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Under export law, all unmanned systems and componenents are considered weapon systems and can’t be sold or operated with, or around, foreign nationals without very costly and difficult-to-get approval. By and large, the military is the only customer rich and patient enough to go through this process. Meanwhile, domestic commercialization is still on hold waiting for an FAA regulatory structure to emerge.

Tad McGeer, Aerovel CEO, said that ITAR applies to ALL robotic aircraft regardless of application, and this effectively forces all small businesses to become military arms dealers instead of small businesses. McGeer points out that the UAS industry is still mostly made up of very small businesses, and that direct competition with manned aircraft is a long way off. The end-user cost per flight-hour, even with cost reductions, is still not competitive. UAS startups need to look for a niche. Some of the characteristics of favorable niches are reductions in aircraft, startup and logistics costs, greatly improved reliability and ease-of-use, offshore and remote areas, scope for miniaturization, parallel operations with multiple aircraft and high utilization.

Parallels with the history of automobiles

Chad Partridge, who is a Board member of AUVSI, as well as founder of Sensing System and VP of 2D3 Sensing, placed the current regulatory confusion and public angst over drones in parallel with the history of the automobile. Drones are part of a moral debate, and the industry is being regulated around some very negative perceptions. In hindsight, our common perception is that there was immediate acceptance for automobiles because we can no longer imagine a society without them, however there were decades of conflict over the role of motor vehicles. Before the city streets were physically reconstructed for automobiles, the social landscape had to be built.

Partridge recommends “Fighting Traffic” by Peter Norton, Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia. Norton examines a range of perspectives during the period from 1900 to 1930, from police who had to become ‘traffic cops’, city planners who tried to regulate traffic, parents and pedestrians who campaigned for ‘safety’ and ‘justice’ over the loss of the street in sometimes violent opposition to automobile interest groups who, themselves, invoked the rhetoric of ‘freedom’.

Partridge suggests that the lessons learned from the automotive past are the importance of banding together as an industry, promoting better narratives, and steering legislations and standards. Industry solidarity and networking are things that organizations like AUVSI and Silicon Valley Robotics can play an important role in.

Agriculture – the answer

As the AUVSI report from March 12 2013 explains, agriculture is the optimal vertical for unmanned systems at the moment, and can deliver billions of dollars of economic value alongside thousands of jobs and the social good of reduced pesticide/fertilizer use. The barriers to entry are lowest and the potential returns are the highest in this market. There were several speakers focussing on aspects of this area including Chris Anderson of 3D Robotics, one of the fastest growing venture backed robotics startups in the Valley. 3D Robotics has iterated from a DIY community supplier to a consumer robot company, and now to a data and payload service provider.

As Chris Anderson asked, what is drone data good for? Vineyards currently use an analog sensor technology that has been unchanged for thousands of years. There is a rose at the end of each row of grapes and the rose is an early warning for fungal infections. Drones can expedite our emerging ‘Big Data’ capabilities in agriculture, which is the largest industry in the world.

Half of our agricultural inputs (e.g. water, fertilizer) are being wasted because the cost of not treating is greater than the waste cost. Knowledge of where there were leaks in the system would allow for adjustment and an opportunity for closed-loop farming. Farmers want this but they don’t necessarily care about the technology that delivers the data. Drone developers need to talk to farmers in order to create custom trusted solutions.

The folks at 3D Robotics have been talking to a lot of farmers in the last year and have found that each farm is different, not just each crop. Anderson says that companies need to build a community interface and offer a multi-solution package. For example, a farmer should be able to deploy a rover or a copter or a fixed wing system with equal ease, depending on requirements. It should be as simple as picking up a tablet, drawing your boundary, pushing a button to go.

The industry is still at a very early stage, with most customers in it ‘for bragging rights’ rather than economic benefit, however in a short time there should be a bank of success stories to draw on that will support future growth. The market opportunity is in delivering insight, not just drones. It’s about image acquisition, processing and locating. Georeferencing is a significant field opportunity. Data may be freely available but it’s the processing and the insight that offers huge commercial opportunities.

Anderson said, “Stewart Brand is often misquoted.  Yes, he said “information wants to be free” but he also said that “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.”

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. [Whole Earth Review, May 1985, p. 49.]

A timely conference

While SUSBEXPO was primarily about drones, and a majority of the established companies are still defence-funded, it seems clear that a change is underway. The timeliness of the event was mentioned by many of the participants, who came from across the world, as far afield as Australia and the Cayman Islands, and who crossed disciplines from engineering to education, from entertainment to law.

One of the speakers, Matthew Schroyer, is the organizer of ‘drones for journalism‘ which not only destigmatizes drones in the media by highlighting humanitarian and libertarian use cases but is also the professional association for the newly emerging field of drone journalism. As technology changes, professions change in response and Schroyer talks about the ways that journalism must evolve to make use of new data.

The Reuters Institute for Journalism in the UK recently released a report on the implications of the increasing use of drones and ROVs in journalism. The report notes the tension between audience expectation for full media coverage of events and the increasing ease and affordability of deploying drones alongside privacy and safety concerns.

Ambivalence of public acceptance aside, drones in journalism is indicative of many small niche markets for increasing commercialization of robotics technologies. As Schroyer said, “This is a timely conference. We worry about large corporations running the agenda. Small stakeholders are the important ones and are making themselves heard.”

In the words of conference organizer Patrick Egan, SUSBEXPO will return in 2014 to further ‘federate and promote the unmanned systems community’.

Video feeds:

SUSBEXPO Day One – part one | Day One – part two | Day Two – part one | Day Two – part two

The Distributed Robotics Garden, a project of the Distributed Robotics Laboratory, CSAIL, MIT.

There’s much more to agricultural robotics than aerial systems, of course. There are already GPS-guided auto-steering systems on the ground that, when installed on tractors, assure complete coverage of fields with a minimum of overlap from one pass to the next while relieving stress on the generally still-present human operators they may one day replace. This same technology is finding its way into combine harvesters and other large, self-propelled equipment, enabling them to complete their tasks more quickly, using less fuel and reducing waste.

Application of chemicals metered according to need will further reduce waste, and robotic planters are already producing more even stands using less seed. In milking parlors, robots are taking over the tedious, noisome, and somewhat dangerous job of milking cows. Robots that tend vineyards and orchards, pruning and mowing between vines and picking apples, are either already available or well along in their development. Moreover, under pressure from labor shortages, efforts are underway to mechanize or automate labor-intensive aspects of the production and handling of a wide range of speciality crops, from asparagus to strawberries, if not in the field then in preparing the produce for shipment.

Two alternative approaches to the application of robotics to agriculture are hidden in these developments:

1. The robotic control of heavy equipment in field operations: This is essentially an extrapolation of what’s happening at present, but executed with greater precision.
2. Robotic replacement for hand labor: The level of detail required in mapping and manipulation the environment opens the possibility of a new, robotics-intensive approach, initially enabling better practices in the raising of speciality crops, but eventually scaling to replace the methods currently used on large acreages. This robotics-intensive approach is a scenario that involves both significant investment and significant disruption as it scales upward to larger areas and staple crops with thinner margins.

The simple extrapolation approach doesn’t alter the fundamental nature of agriculture as it is commonly practiced. It treats robotics as an add-on or substitute rather than as a transformative opportunity. The obvious risks, involving investment in engineering and in purchasing equipment, while significant for those immediately involved, are finite, estimable, and almost entirely financial in nature. The rewards are similarly modest: for equipment manufacturers, it amounts to keeping up with competitors; for farmers, there may be a slight improvement in margins and maybe a little more time to spend not sitting on a tractor.

The hidden risks with this approach are longer term, and relate to the perpetuation of agriculture as currently practiced, with all of the environmental and nutritional problems that implies. A robotic tractor is still a tractor, compressing the soil over which it passes, necessitating tillage to re-loosen it, consuming energy and exposing the soil to erosion and accelerated mineralization, and reducing its ability to supply nutrients to plants and its ability to absorb and retain water. With a rising human population and finite arable land, the risks of using this approach include the possibility of widespread malnutrition and more frequent famine.

The robotics-intensive approach, which I like to term Cultibotics, but which I’ll simply refer to as ‘robotic gardening’ here, leverages robotics in order to transform current agricultural practice. To accomplish this, the machinery must become autonomous so that a single farmer can oversee the simultaneous operation of many machines. The one-to-one correspondence between operator and machine has driven the increasing size and power of tractors and other machinery, and breaking that correspondence is a necessary first step toward a robotics-intensive approach. Given autonomous machines, and the resulting possibility of operating many of them, the use of much smaller, lighter machines becomes an option. If these machines are also capable of dextrous or otherwise detailed manipulation, an altogether different approach to agriculture becomes possible: one based on the best practices of gardening, applied on a grand scale.

If you’re having trouble imagining what I’m referring to here, consider the Telegarden.

The Telegarden, as installed at Ars Electronica, 1995-2004, Photo courtesy of Ken Goldberg

The Telegarden wasn’t autonomous; rather it was remotely operated by many people in succession. It also wasn’t light or mobile, as it used a pivoting industrial robotic arm to perform all operations. It wasn’t even a particularly serious attempt at gardening, since there was no overall design or production goals driving the planting decisions. What it did was to demonstrate that a robot can perform the physical tasks necessary to maintain a garden. Gardening robots could come in various sizes, some larger and some smaller, could be mobile, and could operate autonomously under the direction of a coordinating system, itself guided by a plan created by the gardener or farmer.
Because they could do their work in a detailed fashion, planting one seed at a time, or pulling one weed at a time, instead of moving soil around in bulk, and because they could have the luxury of operating continuously (24/7 if need be) instead of having to race to get the job done quickly, their power requirements would be modest — well within the bounds of what could be supplied by device-mounted solar arrays and/or on-site wind generators — and the need for energy storage could be minimized by saving operations requiring less power for the nighttime. Some of this technology is already in development, but the preponderance of the work remains to be done, which is to say that there are still many ‘ground floor’ opportunities available: designing gardening techniques suitable to robots, developing hardware to perform those techniques and platforms upon which to mount that hardware, and software to drive it all, both at the device level and for the coordinating system.

Obviously there are risks in this scenario as well: the cost and time required to develop the technology, and then additional time to ramp up production and gradually replace existing equipment. By the time this has been done, some other solution, perhaps the cultivation of algae in water-filled glass tubes, might be well on its way to replacing agriculture altogether. There’s also the risk that only a small percentage of farmers will be willing to give up familiar practices to take advantage of the new technology and the new approach it enables, and a risk that some corporations will choose to resist the change rather than adapt to it.

The benefits, on the other hand, potentially include: the transformation of a monoculture-dominated landscape into a huge garden; reduced reliance on petroleum-based products; improved diets through the extension of mechanization to crops like tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, etc. (making them more affordable); dramatically reduced loss of soil to erosion; reduction of agriculture’s contribution to CO2 production and reversal of the loss of soil carbon, helping to soak up some of the extra CO2 already in the atmosphere; increased system resilience for a more robust response to climate change; and increased respect, and a far more interesting livelihood, for farmers.

For the companies and investors who take the financial risks to bring this about, because much of the savings in reduced fuel and chemical use become available for equipment purchases, there is the potential for a huge payoff.

For society at large, there’s also the economic stimulus of a new industry, one with the subtlety to bring technology to bear in the service of soil fertility, sustainability, and biodiversity, as well as the production of food and other plant-sourced products.

University of Sheffield (UK) AI and Robotics Professor Noel Sharkey (red tie) leading a group to protest killer robots.

Drones aren’t the only killer robots being discussed. There are also armed border robots in Israel and Korea, automatic missile defense systems on land and ships in many countries, and police surveillance drones. Except in the case of incoming missile defense, we don’t presently have the artificial intelligence capabilities to autonomously pick targets and implement armed attacks. In fact, we are many years away from that reality. Yet the headlines are written as if it is already happening.

Armed with Hellfire missiles, General Atomics Predator drone prepares for take-off.

“Killer robots” is a “sell-papers” type of issue. It uses enflamed rhetoric because of America’s prolonged and very public use of armed drones to kill terrorists (albeit with a committee of human pilots and operators that actually pull the trigger even though they are thousands of miles away from the action) and the anger and moral, ethical and legal backlash to that.

Nevertheless, these scary headlines, which call for banning drones of all types, are obscuring the worth of forthcoming commercial applications for unmanned and autonomous flying robots. Unmanned aerial vehicles and systems (UAV and UAS) in agriculture, for mapping and surveying, for search and rescue, disaster relief, science, border patrol and a myriad other applications will begin to appear in America in 2016 (earlier in the EU and Australia where they aren’t as limited by the FAA as are the Americans).

There is no denying the commercial value of these new UASs. One story involving drones occurred recently in Haiti — it has all the elements of smart business, enterprising activists, the fun of flying, and the pleasure of helping. But this story didn’t receive any headlines.

Adam Klaptocz is an engineer and project manager with senseFly, a Swiss spin-off from the EPFL (and recently acquired by the Parrot Group). senseFly makes drones for mapping. Their eBee drone can take pictures down to 2″ precision. Adam and another senseFly employee, Emanuele Lubrano, independently founded a non-profit organization, Drone Adventures, to focus on humanitarian, conservation and cultural uses of drones beyond just mapping. Their first project – funded entirely by donations and grants from the IOM – was a two-week trip to Haiti. You can read about their adventure in a recent Robohub article.

Haiti has endured several recent natural disasters including a terrible earthquake at the beginning of 2010, a violent cholera epidemic at the end of 2010 and Hurricane Sandy at the end of 2012. Disasters not only result in casualties but they also change the landscape of the country; buildings and roads are destroyed and refugees create ever-moving encampments. There is a continuous need for up-to-date imagery for aid distribution, reconstruction and disaster relief.

The Drone Adventures video below shows the fun, the involvement, the flexibility and the need. Bravo to these two adventurers and their new organization.

Although Parrot and senseFly didn’t fund Drone Adventures, they think the project is creative and might want to take part in future missions.

I’m worried that all the negative headlines – and fear reactions to those headlines – may lead to legislation which could hamper the natural emergence of this new and very capable technology. Hence the headline of this article: Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

Most robotics hobbyists will be familiar with the name SparkFun, associating it with an electronics and robotics parts and kits supply house, located in Boulder, Colorado, and perhaps also with the instructional videos they publish on their YouTube channel.

The SparkFun Autonomous Vehicle Competition (AVC) for 2013 took place Saturday, June 8th, on a strip of land separating Boulder Reservoir from a private lake to the south. The event site was fenced in, encompassing what I’d guess to be about ten acres, with an adjacent area of water of similar dimensions marked off by buoys for the aerial course. There was also a fence around the ground course, to separate the vehicles from the crowd.

Held annually since 2009, this is the first time that AVC has not been held on SparkFun’s home turf, located just across CO 119 from the reservoir. The weather for AVC 2013 was nearly ideal, and very comfortable, with only a light breeze, moderate temperature, about 50% cloud cover, but only the occasional drop of rain, and dewpoint about 40°F lower than the temperature. Barometric pressure was on the low side (29.98 in. Hg or lower, corrected to sea level), which may help account for some of the troubles in the aerial competition.

The ambiance was reminiscent of a country fair, with three food trucks on site, a sideshow or two, and raffle drawings based on a variety of parameters (instances of vehicles running into a barrel, number of vehicular collisions, etc.) during particular runs in the ground competition. There was music, intermittent sunshine on fresh green grass, a sandy beach and water that looked swimmable. And not least, the announcers for both ground and aerial competitions had comfortable control of their respective sound-spaces, keeping running commentaries going without resorting to elongated vowels or repetition.

As explained by Robert Cowan in an introductory video published two months prior to the event, featured on the 2013 event website, the move to the reservoir is not the only change from previous years. Instead of the fastest time determining the winner, a point system incorporating bonus points for accomplishment of specific tasks while negotiating the course was used.

On the ground, contestants started out with 300 points, from which one point was deducted for each second required to complete the course. Bonus points were awarded for each corner passed, for going through a hoop, and for jumping a ramp. In the air, contestants started out with 600 points, again with one point deducted for each second used. Aerial bonus points were awarded for crossing over the tip of a peninsula, for dropping a tennis ball onto that peninsula, for passing under a twenty-foot high ‘wicket’, for an autonomous landing, and for an autonomous landing within a restricted area. Most of the aerial course was over water.

In the aerial competition, they could have added a bonus for becoming airborne and establishing stable autonomous control, as failing to accomplish one or the other was a frequent occurrence. Perhaps teams from lower elevations underestimated how much difference a few thousand feet can make.

For the ground competition, vehicles were divided into one of four categories: Micro/PBR (less than $350 total spent, or small enough to fit into box that’s 10″x6″x4″), Doping ($1k+ or 25lbs+), Non-traditional locomotion (walker, pogostick, Segway-like balancing, motorized hamster ball, etc.) and Peloton (anything that didn’t fit in one of the other classes). There was also a student class (any robot that is 80% designed and built by high school or younger students), for which any student-built robot qualified, regardless of category. For the aerial competition there was no division into categories.

Autonomous operation is the key ingredient of this event, and overall I was very impressed with the results. For ground vehicles, the only human intervention allowed was at the starting line, to set the vehicle in motion. For aerial vehicles there was a similar requirement, except that manual landing was allowed, with autonomous landing constituting a bonus. While not altogether unique, this combination of autonomous operation and an open-air setting is rare, and precautions were in evidence everywhere, beginning with the waiver to be signed as a condition of entry at the ticket booth.

This sign was no idle warning. By the middle of the day, I’d seen one aerial vehicle rescued from diving into the crowd by a quick thinking operator who took over manual control just in time, another, which failed to get off the ground, taxiing directly toward a young spectator, and prevented from running right into him only because it was precisely centered between two of the posts ringing the parking lot (being used as a start line and landing strip) and its wings were too wide to fit between them. I’d also seen one over-eager ground vehicle go into the infield and do its best to climb a vertical object of some sort, and another, built from a full-sized go-cart, and therefore heavy enough to be dangerous, pin itself against the fence. There was a medical tent, staffed by paramedics, and an ambulance on standby, just in case.

While such risks go with the state of the art of autonomous robotics, the precautions proved adequate, and SparkFun is to be congratulated for a very professionally produced event.

Lest I leave you with the impression that the courses and bonus challenges were too much for the poor robots, I should add that several of the aerial contestants not only completed the course but racked up all of the bonus points. In the ground vehicle competition, more than a few entrants also finished the course, although I don’t know whether any of them also got all of the bonus points. For detailed results of the competitions, keep an eye on the event website, and on SparkFun’s YouTube channel.

Flies have small brains that would not be able to process high-resolution images such as those that we see with our own eyes. Instead, they’ve perfected the use of compound eyes, composed of a dense mosaic of tiny eye-like structures called ommatidia. Each ommatidium consists of a microlense that focuses light from a specific section of the insect’s field of view onto an independent set of photoreceptors. Think of it as having many low-resolution cameras pointing in different directions. The result is a vision system with low spatial resolution (i.e. it can’t see details), but a wide field of view (i.e. it can see all around). By comparing information across the different ommatidia, flies can extract temporal information useful for detecting motion. This motion information, also called optic flow, is what allows flies to navigate, take-off, land and avoid obstacles while using very little processing power.

Inspired by the fly’s vision system, the Curved Artificial Compound Eye (CurvACE) published today in the prestigious journal PNAS can enable a large range of applications that require motion detection using a small plug-and-play device. As shown in the video below, you could use these sensors to control small robots navigating an environment, even in the dark, or equip a small autonomous flying robot with limited payload. Other applications include home automation, surveillance, medical instruments, prosthetic devices, and smart clothing.

The artificial compound eye features a panoramic, hemispherical field of view with a resolution identical to that of the fruitfly in less than 1 mm thickness. Additionally, it can extract images 3 times faster than a fruitfly, and includes neuromorphic photoreceptors that allow motion perception in a wide range of environments from a sunny day to moon light. To build the sensors, the researchers align an array of microlenses, an array of photodetectors, and a flexible PCB that mechanically supports and electrically connects the ensemble. The panoramic field of view is provided by dicing the rigid parts of the ommatidia, thereby allowing the mechanical bending of the sensor. The necessary components for signal readout and processing are embedded in the curvature of the sensor.

CurvACE is a European project bringing together the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in EPFL (Switzerland), the Laboratory of Biorobotics in the University of Aix-Marseille (France), the Fraunhofer Institute of Applied Optics and Precision Engineering (Germany), and the Laboratory of Cognitive Sciences in the University of Tübingen (Germany).

Don’t miss the next ROBOTS podcast for my interview with the researchers behind this new artificial compound eye.

Almost all of the big industrial robot makers have or are working on lightweight and human-friendly arms, but none are offering them at low cost, or with user-friendly training, or the plug and play and safety features. There are other robot startups in the SME marketplace – and on the horizon – but none are as far along in their development and low cost as Rethink Robotics and Universal Robots.

Rethink Robotics’ Baxter

Rethink Robotics‘ new Baxter robot is getting a software upgrade. Big deal? Actually, it is. When Rethink Robotics launched Baxter late in 2012, it was obvious that Baxter needed some improvements. Rodney Brooks promised those improvements incrementally over the next few months and year. Brooks’ vision was to have a hardware platform frequently enhanced with new software and capabilities – and it is happening as promised and on schedule.

Rethink recently launched an academic version of Baxter with a Software Development Kit (SDK) enabling users to train the robot and share their programs with other Baxter owners. Although the SDK academic version is different than the production model, after a while, the concept of an open SDK and an Apple-like app store will be enabled across Rethink’s whole product line.

Just the other day Rethink upgraded their operating system to V1.1 to make it easier to integrate existing factory machine synchronization, I/O and task sequencing and ordering systems into Baxter’s repertoire of programs – a very neat and necessary feature. Now Baxter can integrate and connect with up to 9 digital ports to existing automation systems through signaling. This new update also enables users to coordinate actions across Baxter’s two arms.

Baxters are being produced at a pace for sales of 500+ units in 2013.

Universal Robots UR5 and UR10 Robots

Danish Universal Robots (UR) has quickly built an extensive North American distributor network of 16 experienced robot integrator/distributors.

One of those new distributors, Scott Hendrickson, CEO of Olympus Controls, said: “The quality of new leads has been off the charts. Most of our existing clients are Fortune 500 companies, but now we’re able to better service small business owners on Main Street as well,” he says, attributing the growth to the cost and ease of use of the UR robot. “In typical robot solutions, you multiply the robot cost by three or more to get the end price due to safety guarding and expensive programming. None of this is necessary with the new Universal Robots.” Hendrickson went on to say: “We believe these new robots will soon cross the chasm between early adopters and mainstream users.”

“A key selling point of our robots is that they are continuously upgraded”, said UR Sales Manager Kristian Hulgard. “Once purchased, our users can expect a steady stream of software upgrades giving them access to all the new features on the latest robots to leave the factory. This makes their investment future-proof.”

UR is building 100+ robots a month of which approximately 25-30% are for customers in the U.S.

Both UR and Rethink are finding price acceptability and each have provided case studies of how their robots are being utilized.

Features Comparison

A Couple of Examples of How These Robots Are Being Used

At a Johnson & Johnson factory in Greece, a UR5 is used on a production line where it performs repetitive pick and place tasks as a link between two parts of a production line.

The robot takes bottles of cream from one production line, and places them onto the packaging line. Flexibility is the key requirement because there are several different types of cream containers coming down the line, each positioned differently.

The Greek integrator/distributor, InnoPro Technologies, which sold and installed the robot, said that J&J engineers were 100% satisfied and have even given the robot a name.

A Baxter robot has been deployed at the Rodon Group, a Hatfield, PA injection molder and is among the first plastics processors to deploy a Baxter robot. It is being used for repetitive tasks like picking up parts off a conveyor and placing them into boxes or onto a nearby packaging line.

The robot is being “trained” by the very people it is assisting. Because Baxter is oblivious to heat or noise, it can take on those “hard to fill.”

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

• Rethink Robotics is downsizing
• Unbounded Robotics launch affordable, all-purpose UBR-1
• Co-robots really ARE a BIG thing
• Factory-in-a-Day: EU FP7 invests €7.9M to make robotics affordable for SMEs

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

Interchangeability of h/w components through standardized interfaces and intelligent software components for flexible production are the benefits.

With centers covering The Americas (located at SwRI in Texas) and for Europe (located at Fraunhofer IPA in Germany), ROS-I is looking for a partner to cover Asia.

A one-year video montage shows some industrial robotics applications made possible by the ROS-I repository was founded in 2012. One can see ROS-I controlling robots by ABB, KUKA, Fanuc, Adept, Universal Robots, and Yaskawa-Motoman.

This post is part of Robohub’s We Robot coverage.

Paper: A Licensing Approach to Regulation of Open Robotics
Author: Diana Marina Cooper
Moderator: Michael Froomkin

Last year when Willow Garage announced that the company will be changing its funding model there was a few hours of confusion where some people thought the open source robotics company was going to shut down. The robotics community was shocked to hear the news– later found to be erroneous. Reaction from the research community in particular was that of a panic.

That is because a lot of robotics researchers have been depending on continued existence of the company’s products, especially the open source Robot Operating System (ROS). Currently there are over 90 known institutions all over the world contributing repositories to the ROS community alone, and the number of contributions to the community has been increasing exponentially. And that’s just considering ROS and not the other open robotics communities that exist throughout the world.

Given the popularity of open source communities and its rapid growth it is not surprising that open source was a hot topic of discussion at the We Robot 2013 conference last month. Intellectual property of open source systems was discussed during a panel, power of open source was emphasized during the Robotics Industry Roundtable, and a new license for open robotics was proposed. Part of the discussions involved open robotics as a cause of societal and legal concerns.

Typically, in research institutes, there are a set of rules in place to prevent people from damaging equipment, harming others, and harming people who work within the facility. Outside institutional hierarchy, however, only few things restrict or prevent creative and technically inclined individuals from taking open and easily accessible robotics technologies and creating whatever they wish. That is even if the product is meant to serve horrific ends.

For example, apart from my own set of moral principles, there’s nothing stopping me from taking a LEGO Mindstorm kit, attaching a set of sensors, motors, gears, and a knife together to make a dangerous, yet autonomous tabbing machine of some sort. Not to make things too dramatic, but anyone above the age of 10 can play with LEGO Mindstorms and build robots.

That makes liability issues a big headache in open robotics, where shared design/code is meant to be modified by end-users, as compared to closed robotics. This liability issue also means that manufacturers are turned off from developing open systems.

Is there a way we can foster open robotics and open source communities while addressing these concerns?

At We Robot 2013 Diana Cooper, a JD Candidate at the University of Ottawa, presented her attempt to tackle the open source headache by proposing a new license called the Ethical Robot License (ERL). In her paper, A Licensing Approach to Regulation of Open Robotics, Cooper presents ERL as “a licensing approach to allocate liability between manufacturers and users and promote ethical and non-harmful use of open robots”. You can watch the full panel discussion from We Robot above.

Image from http://presta-ecommerce.com/

Included in the license are positive obligations of designers such as having default privacy setting where people need to opt-in for data collection, disclosure, and use of personal information. The current draft of the license envisions people registering their work to a central database and to keep it up to date of the modifications.

There are also restrictions that are aimed to address the ‘open source robotics for horrific end’ scenario above. Under ERL, you may not make robots that have self-defence capabilities, use or modify robots as a weapon, or make robots that perform certain law enforcement functions, such as surveillance, interrogation and executions. Certain restrictions on military/defense use of robots are also outlined in the license.

As Brad Templeton pointed out during the panel, open source communities value the freedom to share, modify and use technologies. It is curious whether the license that imposes added restrictions will be well received by the communities.

Cooper acknowledges that there’s still more work to be done on the license itself before it can be operationalized. She also agrees that this license doesn’t stop people from doing things that the license is meant to restrict. Nonetheless, given the fact that so many roboticists and hobbyists already benefit from open robotics and – I believe – do not intend their shared work to be used for building robots that harm people and society, the ERL could act as a mechanism to overcome various ethical, legal, and societal concerns pertaining to open robotics.

What do you think about the Ethical Robot License or the idea of regulating open robotics through licensing approach? Let us know in the comments below.

See all the We Robot coverage on Robohub →

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert L. Stephenson

If you’ve ever been a child, chances are that you’ve spent some of your childhood on a swing. And at some point during that time you have probably found out how to move your arms, legs, and body to go higher and higher, without any external help from a friend or parent pushing you – you learned how to pump a swing.

Flavio Fontana, Master student at the ETH Zurich’s Institute for Dynamic Systems and Controls, has taken this concept and used it to control a robot. To make things more challenging, his robot does not just swing, but simultaneously juggles a ball. And, using some neat math to push the idea even further, he and his supervisors Philipp Reist and Raffaello D’Andrea have designed the robot to swing and juggle without cameras – and without ever dropping the ball.

The result of their research is the Swinging Blind Juggler, a robot that juggles a ball from side to side with an actuated paddle attached to a pendulum. The robot is called “blind”, because it has no cameras to “see” the ball. In fact, the Swinging Blind Juggler has no sensors to detect the ball at all.

Here is what Flavio has to say about his video:

In this video, we propose an elegant control strategy for a Swinging Blind Juggler. The key idea is to exploit the dynamic coupling between the motion of the paddle and the pendulum. Children on a swing intuitively use this dynamic coupling to control their amplitude. In a similar way, we control the pendulum with appropriate paddle motions.

So how does this work?

Flavio explains that four conditions must be met for successful juggling:

• First, the paddle used to juggle the ball must have a specific concave shape. This shape will always push the ball back towards the ideal flight path if the ball impact happens to be off-center.
• Second, the paddle has to decelerate as it strikes the ball. This helps to keep the ball bouncing at a consistent height: If the ball flies too high, it will hit the paddle later and hence at a lower speed. Conversely, if the ball flies too low, it will hit the paddle earlier and hence increase the ball’s height on the next bounce.
• Third, the paddle always has to strike the ball at right angles. This ensures that the ball always flies off into the right direction, towards the other side of the swinging motion.
• And fourth, the pendulum must be synchronized to the ball motion. In other words, the pendulum has to reach the peak of its swinging motion at the right time to strike the ball.

To guarantee all of the above, the researchers first derived a mathematical model of the desired motion. Based on these models, they came up with a hardware design that includes a parabolic plate to stabilize the ball’s impact points on the paddle (the first condition), a decelerating paddle motion that stabilizes the ball height (the second condition), and a mechanical mechanism based on four linked bars that automatically tilts the paddle to the right angle for all juggling amplitudes (condition number three).

To meet condition four (to swing back and forth at the right rhythm to hit the ball) the robot can use the same linear motor used to create the decelerating paddle motion for condition two – as long as it still strikes the ball with the right decelerating motion at its peaks. Similar to a child on a playground swing, the robot must raise its body as the swing passes through the lowest point and lower it near the extremes of the motion to pump the swing and swing higher.

The result of the precisely designed hardware setup and control algorithms is a complex motion that’s beautiful to watch – and that blindly juggles a ball from side to side.

To learn more about blind juggling robots, have a look at www.blindjuggler.org.

Note: This post is part of a series that decribes robots developed in Switzerland. If you’d like to contribute a robot to this (or another country’s) series, get in touch at info[@]robohub.org. Like this series? Read more about Swiss Robots!

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

We’re in the midst of National Robotics Week, and roboticists all over the US are celebrating robotics research, development and education through hundreds of events and demonstrations at local libraries, universities, Block Parties and FIRST competitions. The point of National Robotics week is to celebrate, educate and inspire a new generation to pursue careers in robotics. But another key goal of the week is to advocate.

Advocating for cash is one part of the job, because R&D requires lots of it. And if you’re going to acquire cash from granting bodies or investors, you have to convince them that the work you are doing is important, that it’s going to solve a problem, and (if you’re a start-up) that it has commercial potential. And as robotic technologies move from research into commercial viability, advocating for robotics-friendly legislation becomes just as important: if laws and regulations prevent your product from reaching the market, it doesn’t matter how much cash you have.

Nymann Teknik arm, from Universal Robots.

So what does advocacy have to do with jobs? Plenty. The jobs issue is a visceral one. It hits us where it counts: how we earn, how we feed ourselves and our families, how we put a roof over our heads. It’s why employment is always a key issue in election politics – it’s a topic that impacts almost every voter of working age. ‘Robots and jobs’ has become a contentious issue that, like it or not, will determine the success or failure of many new robotics technologies, so it’s no great surprise that there are plenty of people who have something to say about it.

Here are the main points of view that have been entrenched and promoted:

1. Robot replace human workers, and that is a bad thing; they are a ‘disruptive force’ that will cause irrevocable harm to our entire socioeconomic system. See 60 Minutes’ Are robots hurting job growth? and CNN World’s The jobless economy, and the Economists’ Robots don’t complain or die.
2. Robots replace human workers, and that is a good thing; they will take over dull, dirty and dangerous jobs and leave us humans with more time to do interesting/productive work. See Andrew McAfee’s TED Talk, and Wired’s Better than human: Why robots will – and must – take our jobs.
3. Robots don’t steal jobs, they create them; whether through ‘re-shoring’ or through the emergence of new robotics industries, there is tremendous job growth potential for economies that support robotic technologies. See Time’s Can robots bring back manufacturing jobs to the US? and Kuka’s infographic Robots and automation bring jobs back to the US.

To help us tease out the issues we are featuring a week’s worth of coverage on the topic from top experts in the field, including fact finding, analysis and opinion. Here’s a quick teaser of what to expect over the next week or so …

A look at the numbers:

• Frank Tobe gives us a critical walk-through of IFR’s latest Metra Martech report.
• Armed with data from the recently released Economic Impact of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the US,  Chris Mailey from AUVSI suggests that a multibillion dollar market will quickly emerge to create over 100,000 jobs in the US by 2025 once current FAA restrictions to unmanned aerial systems are lifted, as they are schedule to do in 2015.
• Plus, a fact-finding post with all the latest economic reports on the robotics industry.

A look at influencing factors:

• John Dulchinos, Executive Board Member of the International Federation of Robotics, takes us through some of the latest jobs stats and suggest that robotics is eliminating the advantage and influence that low-cost labour has had on manufacturing.
• Rich Mahoney, Director of Robotics at SRI, says that it’s too early to make any grand predictions about how robots will affect the jobs economy in the future, but that the success of robotics companies’ management teams will surely play a critical role.
• In response to the Robotics by Invitation question “Do robots kill jobs?“, Raffaello D’Andrea, co-founder of Kiva Systems, talks about how low interest rates are fuelling the jobs debate; and Mark Tilden argues that robots are just scapegoats, and that corporate ethics are to be blamed for poor employment numbers.
• Regular Robohub contributor and agribot expert John Payne echoes the many voices in the agricultural sector, which point out that agricultural robots will be replacing job vacancies, not people.

Outlook:

• Martin Ford, author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future argues that as robots and other forms of automation progress, machines will take over an ever-increasing fraction of those routine jobs and significant unemployment will become inevitable.
• Federico Pistono, author of “Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy” suggests that technological unemployment is already a reality today and argues that we should use this opportunity to rethink what the purpose of society should be.
• Matt Beane, from MIT’s Sloan School of Management asks if we are on the cusp of a robotics revolution or whether robots are distracting us from the forces profoundly affecting our economy. Matt Beane’s short answer: yes.

And don’t forget:

• Coverage of this week’s Silicon Valley Robot Block Party and Xconomy Forum: Robots Remake the Workplace by Robohub correspondents Frank Tobe and Andra Keay.
• Live streaming of Stanford’s We Robot conference on robotics and the law.
• Sabine Hauert‘s report on Jobs for Roboticists.
• Frank Tobe’s post from January 2013 on how the definition of robots affects how they are perceived in the jobs debate
• And on a lighter note, Jim Haas‘ Nate the Robot – the Dilbert of robotics. Look for Nate in the sidebar!

Managing the ‘issue’ of robots and jobs is important to the success of businesses, research institutions and politicians alike, whether they are ‘for’ robots or ‘against’, so there is no doubt that you will continue to see headlines about robots and jobs for the foreseeable future, both in the mainstream media and here on Robohub. We hope you enjoy this focus series … feedback is welcome, so send us your comments!

See all the posts in Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

“People hate me because they say robots steal jobs.”
“What jobs?”
“Low paid, extremely dangerous, repetitive, physically demanding…”
*boggle*
“I know, right?”

See all the posts in Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

Bottom line, a multibillion commercial market will quickly emerge in the United States with applications ranging from precision agriculture to precision medicine delivery, creating over 100,000 jobs by 2025 just in manufacturing of these new products.

Why UAS?
In the most basic sense, UAS allow for similar capabilities of manned aircraft except without the added weight and size of the pilot and related pilot protection equipment. Once that weight and space (up to several hundred pounds) is stripped, suddenly the platform can be operated in new safer, more accurate ways. For hobbyists, these vehicles are an end unto themselves. For commercial use the vehicles must justify their use through making existing operations cheaper, more effective or less risky. In the report, we focused on markets that have existing data (agriculture and public safety) and made our projections from this data. However, when it comes to new applications, soon the sky will no longer be the limit.

Legislative Barriers
Though the FAA will find safe, effective ways to integrate UAS in the nation’s airspace, lifting what is the only current hurdle to mass commercial adoption, new legislation is under development that will may hinder commercial adoption of UAS. Michael Toscano, President and CEO of AUVSI, recently testified before the US Senate on the matter. Looking purely at the economic implications, states or municipalities that limit UAS use will miss out on the benefits of such systems and will likely quickly change their ways after other states prove the potential of UAS and alleviate current concerns. However, it may be too late for states that adapt slowly, as companies will likely already be established in states without excess restrictions.

Get Ready
Once current FAA restrictions are safely lifted, expect companies to move quickly to capture a piece of the multibillion dollar market. We’re two and half years away and companies in the defense market are already developing new commercial vehicles and new companies are springing up, cutting their teeth in other countries waiting for the right time to enter the U.S. market. These are exciting times and I cannot wait until I don’t have to leave my doorstep to catch a piece of the action.

See all the posts in Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

A few simple facts emerged:

1. It’s true: industrial robots do take away jobs, often in big numbers. Generally, these are jobs that humans don’t want to do or shouldn’t be doing. After a short time, the displaced workers are replaced in higher level tasks (and perhaps re-distributed downstream or elsewhere). This process has already begun, and will continue.
2. On the other hand, Service Robotics create jobs that didn’t exist before, often in respectable numbers — numbers that today,  as Service Robotics grows, may very well equal or exceed jobs lost by the use of industrial robots. And these new jobs could grow to much greater numbers as the industry continues to flourish. These are jobs that people want and that pay well.
3. There is a political component not presently being adequately addressed as automation transforms the workplace by replacing humans with machines that have encapsulated their skills and can perform those skills flawlessly. Retraining and upgrading the general educational system to enable the higher tech skills needed for these new jobs needs a shot of reality instead of spin.
4. Under the rubric that success breeds success, each recent successful robotics venture was less focused on the metrics of labor cost reduction than on enabling growth limited by hard-to-find labor.

Curt Carlson, President & CEO, SRI

As we move quickly toward what Curt Carlson, CEO of SRI International, said is a “zero inventory, zero delay, and 100% personalized” world, it will likely be true that fewer people will be working in manufacturing.

Carlson’s catchy phrase encapsulates both the complexity and simplicity of the process — and the momentum required for it to happen. The process will likely be driven by (1) lower costs of sensors, CPUs and hardware and (2) more capable AI; and the drivers propelling it forward will be the aging population and global competitiveness.

Thus jobs were not the main topic at the Xconomy Forum; the issue was an aside. The main topic was really the progress and inroads robotics are adding to the global automation and business solutions process.

The jobs issue did lend itself to the two best jokes of the day:

1. Ten years from now all the robots will be out on strike saying, “Those damn 3D printers are taking away our jobs!”
2. Let’s reconvene this debate 10 years from now when we have all this time on our hands [after our jobs have been replaced by robots].

Robots on Tour started off on Friday 8 March 2013 with a scientific symposium at café/bar Sphères in Zurich, Switzerland. Big names from the robotic community shared and discussed their research with the audience. The venue was packed, and many people sat on the floor as there weren’t enough chairs.

Just across the street, at the cool Puls 5 venue, 50 classes of youth (aged 13-17) and their teachers took guided tours of the robot exhibition, where they had the chance to directly interact with the robots and their constructors. Of particular interest were the soccer-playing and flying robots.

In the afternoon, after the school groups had left, Dean of the University of Zurich Andreas Fischer welcomed guests to the AI Lab‘s birthday party event, which featured presentations by Rodney Brooks, Rolf Pfeifer, former and current members of the AI Lab, and others. Roboy also had his public debut as an actor in the theater play “To be, or not to be humanoid” by 1visible Productions. And of course, the team that worked so hard to make Robots on Tour possible were thanked for their fantastic work.

From left to right: Tamar Tolcachier, Gina Paolini, Samantha O’Farrell, Martin Simon, Lilla Lukacs.

Saturday, 9 March 2013

Organizers of Robots on Tour were initially skeptical of whether a robot exhibition would attract enough people, and were taken by surprise when on Saturday morning at 09:00 the doors opened to a massive number of visitors waiting to enter! It took only a few minutes to fill the exhibition venue …

… and admittance had to be temporarily halted for safety reasons. Soon, a long queue formed in front of the building …

… which, understandably, wasn’t much appreciated by all those who had to wait outside for two hours despite having bought a ticket ahead of time. Fortunately some of the robots went outside to entertain the the people standing in line, and drinks and chocolates were served. By early afternoon the line up was almost gone.

Despite the long wait, feedback from both exhibitors and the approximate 4000 visitors was very positive: many asked for the event to be extended, for it to return next year (perhaps in another city), and some even asked for the red Robots on Tour T-shirt. If there is enough interest, we might actually sell some.

Over 40 state-of-the-art robots from the US, Europe, and Asia were on display — or rather, interacting with visitors — at the event. The University of Zürich’s AI lab (which initiated Robots on Tour to celebrate its 25th anniversary) had a cool lounge area designed by Live your balcony featuring its own robots, a timeline poster created by Valerie Bugmann, movies from and about the AI Lab, and of course people explaining their research to the visitors.

Robots on Tour ended with the Swiss Artists-in-Labs event and a screening of the European premiere of the movie archipelago.ch by Adrianne Wortzel and Daniel Bisig. Afterwards the exhibitors started packing their robots so that they could be shipped back to all corners of the world.

Rodney Brooks, carrying Baxter with the help of Max Lungarella.

On Sunday morning the exhibition was already empty, with nothing to remind occasional passers-by of the huge crowd of people that filled Puls 5 the day before… and the robots were patiently waiting for their journey home in their cargo boxes …

Related links:

• Robots on Tour
• AI Lab, University of Zurich
• Puls 5
• sphères
• Live your balcony
• 1visible Productions
• Roboy
• Roboy on Youtube
• Swiss Artists-in-Labs

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems – Predator A /B

These are probably the most widely recognizable military robots; their characteristic design frequently appears in pop culture, art and even in protests. Originated by the work of Abe Karem that later developed into DARPA’s project Amber, under the ownership of the Aeronautical division of General Atomics it evolved into a family of UAS. Based on the GNAT drone, the first RQ-1A Predators were initially used for reconnaissance in the Balkan wars during the 90s. The later MQ-1 armed version in 2002 flying over Afghanistan and operated by CIA was the first drone to shoot a missile at a car convoy. MQ-1 is similar in size to a light passenger plane (it has a 6cyl. reciprocating engine) and is still in use today by many countries while its later -C variant (with a diesel engine) recently entered service with US Army.

The similar in concept but much bigger MQ-9 (Predator B according to GAASI or Reaper as called by USAF) is the main large drone currently used by the US in almost every place there is military action. It has a turboprop engine and can carry a bigger payload. A completely new model, the turbofan stealthy Predator C is currently under development. In a similar fashion to its predecessors it is funded internally — an unusual model for the defense sector but financially very successful for the company.

https://www.ga-asi.com/products/aircraft/

Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk

Another DARPA project, the RQ-4 was designed by Ryan Aeronautical (later absorbed by Northrop Grumman). It is one of the larger UAVs and it operates in high altitude / long endurance flight profiles. Although it is probably the most capable system of its kind, it is also one of the most expensive to the point that USAF is on the verge of dropping it in favor of the manned U-2 aircraft that it was supposed to replace. However newer versions with more capabilities are still being developed (and even delivered) while an armed version (MQ-4C Triton) is being developed for the US Navy.

http://www.northropgrumman.com/Capabilities/GlobalHawk/Pages/default.aspx

Samsung-Techwin SGR-A1

Military robots are still in their early days and this is a very characteristic example of a system that was developed for very specific needs. The SGR-A1 is an automated gun turret that is designed to replace an armed guard. It has an electro-optical detection system and a machine gun. It can detect a human, shout warning messages and even exchange passwords orally or understand gestures (like raising hands for surrender). Of course it can also shoot bullets, but usually (though not necessarily) a human is in the loop for that decision. It will be fielded along the borders between North and South Korea. The de-militarized zone here isn’t the biggest in the world lengthwise, but due to local tension it is guarded for its entire length.

http://www.samsungtechwin.com/product/product_01_01.asp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMkV8E2re9U
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/rok/sgr-a1.htm

Northrop Grumman MQ-8 Fire Scout

Fire Scout is one of the first VTOL UAVs. The MQ-8B is an improved and armed version of the initial RQ-8A and both are based on the manned commercial Schweizer helicopters (330 and 333 respectively). MQ-8 is already in use by the US Navy and it had been deployed to Afghanistan and Libya. The next more capable version, the MQ-8C will be based on the Bell 407, a completely different aircraft, providing a good example of the hierarchy inside an unmanned system where the aerial platform isn’t always (or usually) the primary component.

http://www.northropgrumman.com/Capabilities/FireScout/Pages/default.aspx

Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel

This is probably the first UAV designed to operate in a hostile environment where air-superiority isn’t a given. The RQ-170 was revealed from ‘paparazzi’ photos shot in the Kandahar airfield in 2009 that gave it the “beast of Kandahar” nickname. It was officially declared RQ-170 (an out of line number and a non-too accurate RQ- designation, in similar fashion to the F-117 stealth bomber) but most details were revealed when Iran captured one in late 2011. From the images and video released from Iran media, the RQ-170 appeared to be much smaller than initially estimated and not as high-tech. It has a low rcs design but it appears to be simple in construction, for example it has a mesh in the engine inlet (like the first generation stealth aircraft) instead of a serpentine duct. Even so it is probably the only large UAV that can operate undetected and it is rumored that it was used in the operation that lead to the kill of Osama bin Laden.

http://www.af.mil/information/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=16001

iRobot Packbot

Packbot is a very successful robot made by iRobot. It uses a patented variable geometry track system that enables it to overcome obstacles like climbing stairs while being very stable. There are many versions and it can be equipped with various accessories like manipulators and cameras. More than 2000 packbots are already in use in several roles such as disposing IEDs, reconnaissance and more.

http://www.irobot.com/us/learn/defense/packbot.aspx

Insitu Scan Eagle

ScanEagle is a military derivative of SeaScan, a small UAV designed by Insitu for the fishing industry. A patented system that uses a catapult with a slingshot for launch, and a wire-hook pole called Skyhook, enable its deployment and recovery from a small ship. This concept is the core of Insitu products and it is very useful for military use as a portable system. Insitu is now owned by Boeing, and although SeaScan wasn’t successful commercially, the Scan Eagle is widely used and it has developed into a family of UAVs that includes the larger ‘integrator’ and others.

http://www.insitu.com/systems/scaneagle

Qinetiq-NA Talon

Talon is a small tracked robot initially developed by Foster-Miller (now part of Qinetiq North America). It is a versatile platform that can carry many sensors and actuators, and it can move through difficult terrain like a small tank. An armed version called SWORDS is equipped with a machine gun, a first for a robot like this, although it is not yet in use.

https://www.qinetiq-na.com/products/unmanned-systems/talon/

Aerovironment RQ-11 Raven

The smallest system in this post, the RQ-11 looks like a small R/C plane. It is hand launched by throwing and it ‘crash’ lands with the wing detaching from the fuselage. It has many capabilities for its size, and can be easily transported. Almost 20 000 have been produced and are in use by many militaries around the world.

http://www.avinc.com/uas/small_uas/raven/

Designing robots that can function outside of controlled, factory environments isn’t easy. When those environments have people in them, they are especially unpredictable and difficult for a robot to navigate.

Enter Rezero: a compact ballbot that can fluidly drive in any direction without prior orientation. Similar in size and shape to a human, Rezero can stabilize, instantly accelerate, avoid obstacles and turn around its own axis. It can also be programmed to follow a path, or a person at a constant distance, and it can even recover from jostles, making it ideal for navigating crowded environments like tradeshows, restaurants, offices and airports.

Possible Rezero applications: personal mobile medical device, telepresence tour guide, personal transportation.

It’s easy to imagine it one day being used to unobtrusively serve drinks at a cocktail event, as a personal mobile device for intravenous equipment at a hospital, or topped with a telepresence device and acting as a museum tour guide. Rezero could even one day rival the Segway as a personal transportation device.

A master of fluidity

Like an inverted pendulum, Rezero (left) balances on a spherical ball; three omniwheels (right) transfer motor action to the ball below.

Rezero’s agility comes from a propulsion and stabilization mechanism that keeps the device balanced on top of a single spherical wheel, like an inverted pendulum; it’s kept from falling over by constantly moving its contact point below its center of gravity.

A sensor called an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) measures Rezero’s tilt angle, which is used by an onboard stabilizing controller to compute what kind of motor action is required to keep the system stable. Instructions are then sent to electric motors that actuate three special wheels (called omniwheels), which in turn transfer forces to the sphere below: forces are applied in the rolling direction, but allow for free motion in the lateral direction; opposing each wheel is an arrestor that keeps the ball tightly in place. This process of measuring, computing, and actuating happens 160 times per second, and the underlying controller is key to achieving robust and dynamic movement.

Its ability to quickly respond to a changing environment is what makes Rezero so suitable for human environments, and according to Rezero’s creators, achieving this robustness was their most challenging task. Rezero’s controller is derived from a three-dimensional mathematical model of the system, and can combine complex and fluid movements around all axes. Compared to other ballbots, which can only lean a few degrees, Rezero can tilt up to 17 degrees as it leans into a curve at high speeds.

But getting there wasn’t easy. Rezero was developed in 2009/2010 as an educational project at the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich,  and the 13 undergraduate students on the team were responsible for everything from concept to engineering, manufacturing and budgeting.

According to project leader Péter Fankhauser:

“It was the moment we got Rezero to balance for the first time that struck me the most. We got to know the system and work with it and were able to observe how its capabilities improved every day.”

Michael Neunert, his fellow founding team member agrees:

“The development phase was a very intense time. We only had nine months to sketch out our ideas and build Rezero as we see it today.”

Rezero continues to evolve even though some of the original team members have already graduated and moved on. The current team has just finished a new version of the omniwheel, which they have made available to other research groups. They are now working to improve Rezero’s robustness so that it can better manage obstacles in an everyday environment.

Key infos

Robot name: Rezero
Mechanical engineering: Simon Dössegger, Péter Fankhauser, Corsin Gwerder, Jonathan Hüssy, Jérôme Käser, Thomas Kammermann, Lukas Limacher, Michael Neunert
Electrical engineering: Samuel Schüller, Swen Wigert
Industrial design: Jessica Baumgartner, Tu-Van Giang, Claudio Maestretti
Project supervisor: Prof. Dr. Roland Siegwart, Director of the ASL at ETH Zurich
Websites: http://rezero.ethz.ch, TED Talk
Status: Ongoing research project

Photo credits: Rezero in Motion (first photo): Karl-Heinz Hug, Ringier AG; Rezero in the Studio (third photo): Gerhard Born, Ringier AG.

Note: This post is part of our Swiss Robots Series. If you’d like to submit a robot to this series, or to a series for another country, please get in touch at info[@]robohub.org.

Participants will get a KUKA youBot on a loan basis *free of cost* for a period of four weeks. They will only have to cover the cost for shipping and insurance of the youBot and for hosting a group of students in their labs.

The youBot HACKATHONS organized in Germany during the second European Robotics Week in 2012 attracted around 40 undergraduate students at hackathons at the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Science,  at the Institute for Software & Systems Engineering, Augsburg University and at the Bundeswehr University in Munich.

For more information about the project, please visit the KUKA youBot store website

Takara Tomy is introducing AutoMee, a $20 smartphone and tablet-cleaning robot, to the Japanese market in March. AutoMee doesn’t show up on Takara Tomy‘s English website but is prominently featured on the main (Japanese) site. Recognizing edges, AutoMee just keeps spinning and rotating around the surface and has a lens-cleaning paper on it’s underside to enable cleaning.

WowWee demonstrated it’s newest robot RoboMe at the 2013 Toy Fair in anticipation of 2013 holiday sales. RoboMe can work in two modes: you can remove the faceplate and replace it with your iPhone or iPod Touch, download, install and initiate an app, and, using graphics, voice and vision, remotely control their RoboMe. It can also operate with a remote control device and the faceplate but without the Siri-like personality.

Grillbot is exhibiting at recent housewares, BBQ and foodservice trade shows with their new grill cleaning Grillbots. Using three powerful servos driving three replaceable bristle brushes, the Grillbot can navigate all over the grill scrubbing as it goes and regulating it’s speed and direction. Grillbots will be available early summer for $70. An upgraded model will retail for $100.

Desk Pets has added Tankbots to their line of inexpensive robotic-like toys. The $30 Tankbot can navigate mazes, avoid obstacles and be remotely controlled with a smartphone or tablet.

Romotive, the Las Vegas start-up that did so well with their Romo robot, has updated Romo to be far more stylish and faster than the previous model. The new Romo will sell for $149 and start shipping in June.

SmartLab Toys has release ReCon 6, a programmable rover selling for $70. It can be programmed to fetch items and speak recorded messages. It’s intended to be an instructional device for kids to learn programming.

The ultimate learning device, of course, is the Lego Mindstorms EV3 (Evolution 3) which will be released this summer for $434. Kids can build, program and test their programmable robots using motors, sensors, gears, wheels and axles.

Finally, Sphero is releasing an augmented reality application to enhance the experience of making the Sphero ball move from place to place. Instead of the ball being a ball, it comes to life as a beaver named Sharky with virtual toys and other innovations. The ball costs $130 and the app is free.

Note: This is not a complete list of the toys and gadgets that will hit the market this year, but it is a selection that came across my desk and which shows the breath of that which will soon be available for purchase. If you know of other robotic toys and gadgets, please send them my way. Thanks.

Two of the most challenging problems tackled with quadrocopters so far are balancing an inverted pendulum and juggling balls. My colleagues at ETH Zurich’s Flying Machine Arena have now combined the two.

As part of his Master thesis Dario Brescianini, student at ETH Zurich’s Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, has developed algorithms that allow quadrocopters to juggle an inverted pendulum . If you are not sure what that means (or how that is even possible), have a look at his video “Quadrocopter Pole Acrobatics”:

(Don’t miss the shock absorber blowing up in smoke at 1:34!)

The Math

A quadrocopter with a plate for balancing the pole. The cross-shaped cut-outs are used for easy attachment to the vehicle and have no influence on the pendulum’s stability.

To achieve this feat, Dario and his supervisors Markus Hehn and Raffaello D’Andrea started with a 2D mathematical model. The goal of the model was to understand what motion a quadrocopter would need to perform to throw the pendulum. In other words, what is required for the pendulum to lift off from the quadrocopter and become airborne?

This first step allowed to determine (theoretical) feasibility. In addition, it showed the ideal trajectory in terms of positions, speeds, and angles the quadrocopter needed to follow to throw a pendulum. And it offered an insight into the throwing process, including identification of its key design parameters.

Reality Checks
The main goal of the next step was to determine how well the theoretic model described reality: How well does the thrown pendulum’s motion match the mathematical prediction? Does the pendulum really leave the quadrocopter at the pre-computed time? How does the pendulum behave while airborne? How well do assumptions for catching the pendulum (e.g., completely inelastic collisions, completely rigid pendulum, infinite friction between quadrocopter and pendulum when balancing) hold?

This second step involved multiple tests with the physical system, including throwing the pendulum by hand to study its aerodynamic properties and precisely timing the quadrocopters’ and pendulum’s motions during the maneuver.

Analyze, Experiment, Repeat

The shock absorber at the end of the pendulum is a balloon filled with flour and attached to a sliding metal cap with zip ties.

Armed with a good theoretical model and knowledge of its strengths and limitations, the researchers set out on a process of engineering the complete system of balancing, throwing, catching, and re-balancing the pendulum. This involved leveraging the theoretic insights on the problem’s key design parameters to adapt the physical system. For example, they equipped both quadrocopters with a 12cm plate that could hold the pendulum while balancing and developed shock absorbers to add at the pendulum’s tips.

This also involved bringing the insights gained from their initial and many subsequent experiments to bear on their overall system design. For example, a learning algorithm was added to account for model inaccuracies.

Dario writes:

This project was very interesting because it combined various areas of current research and many complex questions had to be answered: How can the pole be launched off the quadrocopter? Where should it be caught and – more importantly – when? What happens at impact?

The biggest challenge to get the system running was the catching part. We tried various catching maneuvers, but none of them worked until we introduced a learning algorithm, which adapts parameters of the catching trajectory to eliminate systematic errors.

The long and iterative process of this third step resulted in the final successful architecture to repeatedly throw and catch the pendulum on the real system, including three key components:

First, a state estimator was used to accurately predict the pendulum’s motion while in flight. Unlike the ball used in the group’s earlier demonstration of quadrocopter juggling, the pendulum’s drag properties depend on its orientation. This means, among other things, that a pendulum in free fall will move sideways if oriented at an angle. Since experiments showed that this effect was quite large for the pendulum used, an estimator including a drag model of the pendulum was developed.
This was important to accurately estimate the pendulum’s catching position.

Another task of the estimator was to determine when the pendulum was in free flight and when it was in contact with a quadrocopter. This was important to switch the quadrocopter’s behavior from hovering to balancing the pendulum.

Second, a fast trajectory generator was needed to quickly move the catching quadrocopter to the estimated catching position.

Third, a learning algorithm was implemented to correct for deviations from the theoretical models for two key events: A first correction term was learnt for the desired catching point of the pendulum. This allowed to capture systematic model errors of the throwing quadrocopter’s trajectory and the pendulum’s flight. A second correction term was learnt for the catching quadrocopter’s position. This allowed to capture systematic model errors of the catching quadrocopter’s rapid movement to the catching position.

The Result
As you can see in the video embedded above, at the end of Dario’s thesis two quadrocopters could successfully throw and catch a pendulum.

Many of the key challenge of this work were caused by the highly dynamic nature of the demonstration. For example, the total time between a throw and a catch is a mere 0.65 seconds, which is a very short time to move to, and come to full rest at, a catching position.

Another key challenge was the demonstration’s high cost of failure: a failed catch typically resulted in the pendulum hitting a rotor blade, with very little chance for the catching quadrocopter to recover. A crashed quadrocopter not only entailed repairs (e.g., changing a propeller), but also meant recalibration of the vehicle to re-determine its operating parameters (e.g., actual center of mass, actual thrust produced by propellors) and restarting the learning algorithms.

Says Markus Hehn:

This was a really fun project to work on. We started off with some back-of-the-envelope calculations, wondering whether it would even be physically possible to throw and catch a pendulum. This told us that achieving this maneuver would really push the dynamic capabilities of the system.

As it turned out, it is probably the most challenging task we’ve had our quadrocopters do. With significantly less than one second to measure the pendulum flight and get the catching vehicle in place, it’s the combination of mathematical models with real-time trajectory generation, optimal control, and learning from previous iterations that allowed us to implement this.

Note: The Flying Machine Arena is an experimental lab space equipped with a motion capture system.
Full disclosure: I work with Dario Brescianini, Markus Hehn, and Raffaello D’Andrea at ETH Zurich’s Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control.

More photos:

Credits: Carolina Flores, ETH Zurich 2012

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

• Three new quadrotor videos demonstrate agile control and the power of machine learning
• Live at TED Global 2013: Tweets, photos and video for quadrotor fans
• Behind the scenes at TED Global: Raffaello D’Andrea and team demo amazing quadrotor “athletes”
• Quadrocopters learn from prior experience to improve slalom flying

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

For more information about the eBee, check out one of our previous posts.

Bolt, Ben Einstein’s hardware and robotics accelerator in Boston, today announced the close of their first funding round and the opening of the first round of applications for 2013 hardware startups. Bolt has a 4000 sq ft high end prototyping shop under their offices in the Downtown Crossing district and plans to open the doors in May.

Strategic investors Logitech, Autodesk and Grishin Robotics join with angel investors including Semyon Dukach, Mick Mountz, Eran Egozy, Brad Feld, and Bruce Sachs to raise $3.5 million in funding. Xconomy reports that a “regulatory filing suggests Bolt is planning to raise a little less than $5 million in total, which should let it operate for a couple of years.”

Bolt exists to help early-stage hardware companies get their products to market. Our core program offers cash, mentorship, shop equipment, professional engineering staff, financing and manufacturing relationships to 10 startup companies every 6 months. But we’re happy to provide advice to any hardware startup, even ones that don’t apply to our program. You can send a note asking for help with a specific product at any time to: help (at) buildatbolt (dot) com. [bolt.io]

As Ben Einstein points out, Bolt is providing something similar to Lemnos Labs in San Francisco, or Haxlr8r in China, or Techshops anywhere, and he believes that hardware experience is critical to nurturing hardware startups. It’s something that typical accelerators – like Y Combinator – can’t provide.

The core team at Bolt has a good mix of skills and experience in hardware startups. Ben Einstein is a product designer and entrepreneur who previously ran Brainstream Design and he says he’s most comfortable with a face full of metal filings. Axel Bichara is a venture capital veteran with a mechanical engineering background. Axel was a partner at Atlas Venture, cofounder of Premise (acquired by Computervision) and lead investor in SolidWorks (acquired by Dassault Systemes). Scott Miller was VP of Engineering at iRobot, and has built 3M units of robots like Roomba. Scott is also the founder and CEO of Dragon Innovation which has overseen the far-east manufacturing of products like Pebble, Zeo, and Orbotix.

Bolt also provides access to a stellar array of mentors with experience specific to robotics and hardware, such as Mick Mountz (Kiva) and Brad Feld (Foundry Group). Projects’ founders will receive seed capital, access to office and prototyping facilities, and extensive support from a full-time engineering/design staff and a wide array of hardware-centric mentors. Bolt’s program is focused on key aspects of ideation and development of any successful mass-market hardware products, including manufacturing and commercialization.

I suspect that after this first application round, Bolt may find it easier to take applications on a rolling basis rather than a tranche.

At the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) last October, I saw an excellent talk by Dr. Kaori Kuribayashi-Shigetomi from the University of Tokyo about “Cell Origami”. Her work, which was recently published in PLOS One, uses the natural pulling force that cells produce on surfaces where they grow to fold smartly cut and positioned 2D sheets into desired 3D structures. The process, demonstrated in the video below, shows cells grown on top of engineered microplates fixed to a flat surface. To fold the structure, simply detach the microplates from the surface and allow the cells to pull them into a 3D structure. The cells in this case act like a rubber-band. Such 3D structures could be useful for a variety of applications including tissue engineering or 3D assembly at the microscale. By using the natural beats produced by heart cells (cardiomyocytes) to actuate the microplates, she is then able to make a “flapping robot”. The end of the video shows that these 3D structures can be mass produced with 1200 structures folded per cm².

(1) strategic funding from NASA, DARPA, DoD, NSF and other government organizations to do the pure science involved in solving stumbling blocks in robotics, and

(2) entrepreneurial-initiated funding from friends and family, angel investors, VCs and “special people” like Scott Hassan, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, or Sergey Brin.

In addition, some funding is available via macro programs such as the Roadmap for US Robotics, which don’t move at the same speed as the entrepreneur-initiated projects.

Finally, surrounding each of the major universities involved in robotics research and education are clusters of support networks working with and supplementing the universities’ own commercialization activities. Stanford and UC Berkeley in the Bay Area of California; Georgia Tech in Atlanta; CMU in Pittsburgh; and MIT and Harvard in Boston. All of these clusters and commercialization activities are without government stimulus or direction.

Willow Garage is a perfect example of the benefits of special people: Scott Hassan had a vision to jump-start robotics – particularly the open source software side – and he invested hundreds of millions of dollars in that pursuit. From Willow Garage came seven notable spin-offs including an ongoing non-profit to perpetuate ROS.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page from Google established Google X-Labs, invested in Tesla Motors, and many more.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has set up a fund that has invested in all sorts of start-ups: from Uber to Behance to Linden Labs.

The real excitement comes from the special people: They not only enthusiastically give back with profits from their own experiences, but also bring the same level of energy that made them successful to funding of new robotics projects.

Read more answers →

So, depending on who you ask, Willow Garage is shutting down, pursuing commercial interests, or changing direction. But things are not as dire as some may think: ROS is fine (the OSRF will support it) and there are many options for Willow Garage to explore. Personally I’m hoping it will be snatched up by Stanford or another academic institution and become a research institute. But given the number of robots they have out (and their price tags!), a commercial path into the future seems even more likely. In any case, I doubt that Willow Garage will disappear just like that.

What caused the changes is that Willow’s founder and funder, Scott Hassan, has decided that it’s time to wean Willow Garage from his private financial support.

I’ve never met Scott, but first and foremost I think we – roboticists and robot enthusiasts around the globe – all owe him a huge THANK YOU! I think it’s fair to say that if it had not been for Scott, we would not have universities around the world sharing a common robot operating system. And, looking at the amazing contributions on the Willow Garage blog, it seems clear that the past five years in robotics would have been a lot less exciting without ROS and Willow Garage’s robots.

Scott brought the model of impact first, monetize later to robotics. Together with Steve Cousins he assembled an amazing team of people and established a network of external collaboration far and beyond anything ever seen in robotics. Did it get us a household robot that can serve us a cup of tea? No. But WOW, did it ever fast-forward us towards that goal.

So thank you Scott, for your vision, incredibly generous financial contributions, and for leading with actions. Willow Garage has already had a huge impact, and I’m sure there’s much more to come. I’m greatly looking forward to the next steps of Suitable Technologies. We all have much to look forward to from Willow Garage’s other already existing spinoffs (convenience links below) – and, who knows, from Willow Garage itself in one form or another.

Change and innovation are usually good friends, at least in my book. In spite of all the negativity out there I, for one, think the future of robotics has never been brighter.

Official info:

• Willow Garage’s official statement: Willow Garage is changing
• The Open Source Robotics Foundation’s statement: ROS @ OSRF

Willow Garage’s spin offs (to date):

• Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF)
• Suitable Technologies
• Industrial Perception Inc. (IPI)
• hiDOF Inc.
• Redwood Robotics
• OpenCV
• Open Perception Foundation

NERVE, the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation Center at UMass Lowell, when it opens tomorrow, will be one of three such facilities in the United States. Incorporating elements of NIST’s Standard Test Methods for Response Robots, the facility will present candidates for validation with a wide range of challenges to be overcome.

Via Robotics Business Review

Making robots that are able to localize, track and separate multiple sound sources, even in noisy places, is essential for their deployment in our everyday environments. This could for example allow them to process human speech, even in crowded places, or identify noises of interest and where they came from. Unlike vision however, there are few software and hardware tools that can easily be integrated to robotic platforms.

The ManyEars open source framework allows users to easily experiment with robot audition. The software, which can be downloaded here, is compatible with ROS (Robot Operating System). Its modular design makes it possible to interface with different microphone configurations and hardware, thereby allowing the same software package to be used for different robots. A Graphical User Interface is provided for tuning parameters and visualizing information about the sound sources in real-time. The figure below illustrates the architecture of the software library. It is composed of five modules: Preprocessing, Localization, Tracking, Separation and Postprocessing.

To make use of the software, a computer, a sound card and microphones are required. ManyEars can be used with commercially available sound cards and microphones. However, commercial sound cards present limitations when used for embedded robotic applications: they can be expensive and have functionalities which are not required for robot audition. They also require significant amount of power and size. For these reasons, the authors introduce a customized microphone board and sound card available as an open hardware solution that can be used on your robot and interfaced with the software package. The board uses an array of microphones, instead of only one or two, thereby allowing a robot to localize, track, and separate multiple sound sources.

The framework is demonstrated using the microphones array on the IRL-1 robot shown below. The placement of the microphones is marked by red circles. Results show that the robot is able to track two human speakers producing uninterrupted speech sequences, even when they are moving, and crossing paths. For videos of the IRL-1, check out the lab’s YouTube Channel.

For more information, you can read the following paper:
The ManyEars open framework, F. Grondin, D. Létourneau, F. Ferland, V. Rousseau, F. Michaud, Autonomous Robots – Springer US, Feb 2013

We all know that robots are the gateway to STEM education, so what’s not to love about getting 4 robots in a box, complete with lessons preloaded on a tablet. As both the US and UK undergo core curricula changes to better reflect the changing workforce and education needs, the market potential for robotics in education grows. As well as workng in the consumer and cloud robotics space, Elad Inbar is the CEO of RobotsLab, a new educational robotics company, who launched their “BOX” of robots today at the TCEA education convention in Austin TX.

The BOX contains 4 robots; AR.Drone, Sphero, Armbot and Mobot; that demonstrate core concepts in algebra, physics, geometry, trigonometry and calculus. The BOX also contains accessories and a tablet preloaded with 50 lessons, all thoroughly tested by an expert teacher panel in classrooms prior to the launch.

“You can open the box, turn-on the preloaded tablet and within minutes explain quadratic equations with a Quadcopter” explains Prof. Peter Stone, UT Austin. “You don’t need to be experienced with robotics or have a degree in computer science, just an enthusiasm for your subject area.”

I have seen quite a few robot startups entering trying to enter the education sector recently, but few have the strategies or resources to tackle the incumbents, like Lego. One problem for the sector is the lack of market data specific to robotics. Robotics statistics agencies like IFR don’t seem to offer useful figures specific to this vertical and market leaders in the education space don’t share their data. New and emerging companies face an uphill battle gaining initial investors as they move from the research and prototype stage (usually supported by universities) into the commercialization stage. At the same time, they have to learn how to crack the tough customer nut that is the education system. Still if robotics can sell into defence and health, then education is achievable. And presumably, once you’ve broken into the market, you gain a lot of traction as an incumbent.

I interviewed Elad Inbar about robot startups entering the education sector:

[Elad Inbar] “The IFR (International Federation of Robotics) does not provide data about this market in this level of granularity and most of the companies don’t really share data about their sales, it is hard to figure out the actual value. Based on my experience in the educational robotics market in the past 4 years and our understanding of the market, I can say that the market (hardware sales – including robotic kits from DIY, VEX and LEGO, over to all kinds of robotic arms and similar robots and all the way to advanced robots for research such as NAO, Q.bo and DARwIn) is roughly $50-60 million\year. If you include services such as training, courses, development, after hour classes, etc. then the number will go up to roughly $150-200\year.

To me, the market has not yet reached even 10% of its potential, as educational robotics are mainly focused on computer science, robotics, artificial intelligence and such. There are many other niches in the education that can definitely benefit from robotics – such as our product that teaches Algebra, Geometry and science.”

[Elad Inbar] “We want to bring this unique experience to every school, we crafted state-of-the-art lessons that teachers and students love, and created an aggressive pricing and warranty, ensuring that every school will be able to get this revolutionary teaching-aid tool.”

[Andra Keay] And what differentiates you from other products in the area?”

“[Elad Inbar] All the educational robotics lessons are focused around computer science, robotics (building or programming), artificial intelligence and similar advanced topics. However, if students don’t understand the basics of math, they won’t be able to handle any advanced topic. No other product is using robotics to teach Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry and Calculus that are the foundation for SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping) as an example.

We believe that the BOX and its lessons (apps) can make the difference for so many students who are struggling with the basics of STEM.”

The Argo project, which has deployed a network of more than 3’600 robots covering all of the world’s oceans, has returned it’s 1’000’000th measurement.

The yellow underwater robots with their characteristic cylindrical body topped by an antenna have now been successfully used for more than 10 years for precise, long-term measurements of ocean temperatures and salt content. The robots stay submerged for up to 10 days at a time, drifting with ocean currents at a specified depth, or rising and falling in pre-defined paths down to depths of 2000 meters. Upon surfacing, they send their recorded data and current position home via satellite link. The recorded data are then made freely available online in near real-time.

The gigantic network of robot sensors has resulted in a wealth of data, with more than 100 scientific papers published a year. However, it seems scientists on the project agree that Argo’s 10 year data set is not yet long enough to draw reliable conclusions for global change signals such as a global rise in ocean temperatures.

Here are some photos that explain the process:

Photos: Argo project

Samsung Electronics president, Young Sohn, explained that these diverse strategies represented Samsung’s commitment to looking further ahead than 3-5 years, to commercializing innovative research and connecting with entrepreneurs at every level. Samsung is also proud of their proven ability to invest in hardware and components, in part because they control their own supply chain.

Through their Innovation Fellows and partnerships with research groups, Samsung hope to focus on disruptive platforms; the Internet of Everything; Mobile Health; Computer Human Interface; Cloud and Data Center Architecture; and Mobile Privacy. They’d also like to hear from you if you are building something that will play nicely with their new ultra thin flexible display.

Because Samsung is focussing on disruptive technology, its new Innovation Center will be headquartered at Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley, and will be led by Samsung Electronics president and chief strategy officer Young Sohn. “Being in Silicon Valley is critical because this is the epicenter of disruptive innovation,” Sohn said.

“By 2020, Sohn said, Samsung expects there to be 120 billion connected devices around the world. And the company wants to connect all of those devices, hopefully capturing an ever-larger portion of the electronics market in the process. Samsung hopes to double its revenue between now and 2020 and grow to a $400 billion company by that time. With the growing number of devices, Samsung sees the need for new technologies around cloud infrastructure, mobile privacy, Internet of Things, and other related topics.” [http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/04/samsung-strategy-and-innovation-center/]

Samsung’s Venture Americas Fund has already invested $160 million in 2012 in 20 deals, and over the years has seen more than 60 exits, with 47 IPOs and 16 acquisitions. The fund increase to $1 billion shows a strong commitment to hardware and component companies. Alongside the Ventures Fund, the Innovation Fellows and the Catalyst Seed Fund, Samsung are launching an entrepreneur challenge later this year. Aimed at identifying and nurturing artists and engineers, with $10 million in seed funding and access to Samsung’s R&D, Innovation Fellows and SSIC, the SamsungCreate Challenge is a must.

This post was originally published at Robot Launchpad

During the 20 minute presentation, Raffaello D’Andrea revealed some of the key concepts behind his group’s impressive demonstrations of quadrocopters juggling, throwing and catching balls, dancing, and building structures – and illustrated them with live examples with quadrocopters flying on stage.

To watch him hurtle quadrocopters towards his audience, see them juggle balls and balance poles, and to find out what happens when control fails, check out the video:

Other speakers at the Zurich.Minds event included:

• Gerhard Schröder in an interview with host and organizer Rolf Dobelli (in German)
• Tomáš Sedláček on The Economics of Good and Evil
• Kevin Heng on Atmospheric Research of Exoplanets
• Ashkan Nikeghbali on The Fascination of Mathematics
• Lorenz Meier on the Open Hardware Revolution
• Christina Warinner on Evolutionary Diet
• Robert Cialdini on Influence
• Urs Hölzle on Where the Internet Lives, The Hidden Life of Data Centers
• Simone Schürle on Nano Robots for Medicine
• Lars Kolind on Unboss! The new leadership
• John Gray on The Dangers of Faith in Progress, and
• Benjamin Beilmann playing Prokofjew: Sonata for violin solo in D major, Op. 115 on his violin

Full disclosure: I, my colleagues from the Flying Machine Arena, and Raffaello D’Andrea all work in his group at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich.

Here are some photos of the event:

Photos: Zurich.Minds 2012

Gumstix’ announcement of official ROS support accompanies the introduction of a bootable microSD card featuring Linaro 12.11 LTS and ROS preloaded, as well as an image available for download. ROS binaries were previously only available for Intel, AMD or ARMEL architectures, requiring all ARMHF-based implementations to be compiled from source, with build time being a limitation for ROS implementations on an architecture ideally suited to robotics development. While Gumstix users are still able to build ROS from source with relative ease on an existing Overo with Ubuntu system, users wanting a quick, simple solution are now also able to flash an Ubuntu with ROS image to their Overo COM, thus eliminating a serious impediment to ROS development.

Since ROS was first released in November 2007, there has been a growing trend of implementing ROS on Ubuntu-based systems to power robotic devices. By October 2009, 50 organizations or individuals had publicly released ROS software in its indexed repositories, a number which has grown in the last three years to over 175 organizations or individuals. Gumstix support for ROS satisfies its own customers’ growing demand for the ability to implement this increasingly popular open source solution with ease and flexibility as part of a broader trend in ROS development.

“Last June, Gumstix announced its TurtleCore expansion board as a platform for ROS development on the iRobot Create,” said Dr. W. Gordon Kruberg , president and CEO of Gumstix. “The ability to deploy an available ROS binary on our Overo line of COMs complements the goal initially set forth with the introduction of the TurtleCore: to provide the most powerful development system for roboticists in the smallest form factor. This image and the microSD release now provide that software with minimum development time and greater ease.”

“We welcome the support of Gumstix in our efforts to expand the open source robotics community,” said Tully Foote, ROS Platform Manager at Willow Garage. “We love what Gumstix has done to date, and look forward to working with them in the future.”

Developers using customized robotics platforms powered by the Overo will be equally advantaged by ROS, needing only to add packages specific to their solution on top of the standard ROS installation. More information about using Robot Operating System and Ubuntu with Gumstix, including the prebuilt image, is available at the Gumstix Users Wiki, while the $45 bootable microSD with ROS is available at www.gumstix.com.

About Gumstix, Inc.
Since developing the first Linux®-based computer-on-module in 2003, Gumstix has grown to become the premier provider of Linux®-based COMs and expansion boards, with over 15,000 diverse customers in more than 40 countries. Gumstix’ commitment to providing the best, standard platform for ubiquitous, intelligent devices with flexible and open-source design results in less internal development time and faster time-to-market for its customers’ products.

RELATED LINKS
http://www.gumstix.com
PR Newswire (http://s.tt/1yUDg)

In the video above (viaDIYdrones) the demonstration is quite straightforward. Big commercial rockets (like Ariane) use a similar design for their payload fairing that can hold its shape and withstand the aerodynamic loads only when closed. Maverick has the disadvantage of not having wing control surfaces like ailerons and while stable it could experience weaving or roll, however it is equipped with a gimball camera and its footage is quite good for its size and role. More information and videos on Prioria’s website.

The use of UAVs has skyrocketed, a wide variety of systems ranging from extremely small flying bots to large airframes like the Predators or Global Hawk drones is currently in use, mostly from armed forces around the world. Despite this growth, UAVs in civil airspace is a very rare sight with a lot of bureaucracy and strange ramifications.

During the Libya crisis many people who monitor aerial traffic as a hobby, report what is going on from their twitter accounts (like @FMCNL from The Netherlands). One of the most exotic planes for radio plane-spotters is the RQ-4 Global Hawks based in southern Italy that operates in a very crowded region. As David Cenciotti describes in his blog they use special corridors and dedicated climb/descent areas for proper deconfliction with other traffic while specific notifications are also given to other aircrafts. The Global Hawk as a system has two separate ground segments a Launch and Recovery Element (LRE), and a Mission Control Element (MCE). When they are beyond line of sight they are piloted via satellite link. However they carry radio equipment that enable pilots working at the ground station to talk as if they were on the aircraft. Air Traffic controllers communicate with the virtual pilots in a similar way to the ones in human piloted aircraft. The use of large UAVs (military and of course civilian) inevitably will increase and they will communicate routinely like that or in a more advanced stage they may be able to transmit messages on their own.