Mobile Manipulation Hackathon: Moving into Real World Applications

Mobile Manipulation Hackathon: Moving into Real World Applications

March 17, 2021

The Mobile Manipulation Hackathon was held in late 2018 during the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) to showcase the latest applications of wheeled robotic manipulators. The challenge had an open format, where teams developed an application using simulation tools and integrated it into a robotic platform...

Robotic feature in the SIRONA cut-away view. Aesthetics and space for recreation and communal living are core to the design concept.

SIRONA: Sustainable Integration of Regenerative Outer-space Nature and Agriculture. Part 2 — Design Development and Projected Performance

July 4, 2020

A comprehensive Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLiSS) for human Long-duration Space Exploration Missions (LDSEMs) requires an innovative design philosophy and novel technical solutions. SIRONA: Sustainable Integration of Regenerative Outer-space Nature and Agriculture is a greenhouse design that produces a wide variety of food sources and provides life support functions, including...

Identification and Control of a Nonlinear Soft  Actuator and Sensor System

Identification and Control of a Nonlinear Soft Actuator and Sensor System

March 19, 2020

Soft robots are becoming increasingly prevalent, with unique applications to medical devices and wearable technology. Understanding the dynamics of nonlinear soft actuators is crucial to creating controllable soft robots. this letter presents a system identification process and closed-loop control of foldable HASEL (hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic) soft actuators. We characterized...

Robot performing peg-in-hole insertion of a tight bearing

Autonomous industrial assembly using force, torque, and RGB-D sensing

Feb. 1, 2020

We present algorithms and results for a robotic manipulation system that was designed to be easily programable and adaptable to various tasks common to industrial setting, which is inspired by the Industrial Assembly Challenge at the 2018 World Robotics Summit in Tokyo. This challenge included assembly of standard, commercially available...

3D assembly challenge from the World Robot Summit

Robots assembling machines: learning from the World Robot Summit 2018 Assembly Challenge

Dec. 26, 2019

The Industrial Assembly Challenge at the World Robot Summit was held in 2018 to showcase the state-of-the-art of autonomous manufacturing systems. The challenge included various tasks, such as bin picking, kitting, and assembly of standard industrial parts into 2D and 3D assemblies. Some of the tasks were only revealed at...

The nn4mc pipeline: from trained model to embedded source code

Embedded Neural Networks for Robot Autonomy

Nov. 1, 2019

We present a library to automatically embed signal processing and neural network predictions into the material robots are made of. Deep and shallow neural network models are first trained offline using state-of-the-art machine learning tools and then transferred onto general purpose microcontrollers that are co-located with a robot's sensors and...

ROGR: Remotely Operated Gardening Rover performs plant care tasks alongside the astronaut and is able to assist automatically or via remote operation.

SIRONA: Sustainable Integration of Regenerative Outer-space Nature and Agriculture. Part 1 - Architecture and Technology

July 7, 2019

Plant growth systems are a critical component of a comprehensive Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLiSS) for long-duration human space exploration missions. Previous BLiSS technology development and crop selection have primarily focused on optimization of edible biomass and caloric content. In light of advances in horticulture, human space flight science, technology...

Materials need to blur the boundary between perception and control

Materials that make robots smart

June 13, 2019

We posit that embodied artificial intelligence is not only a computational but also a materials problem. While the importance of material and structural properties in the control loop are well understood, materials can take an active role during control by the tight integration of sensors, actuators, computation, and communication. We...

Swarm of 100 droplets self-localizing using range and bearing information

Fault-tolerant covariance intersection for localizing robot swarms

April 10, 2019

This paper examines the important problem of cooperative localization in robot swarms, in the presence of unmodeled errors experienced by real sensors in hardware platforms. Many existing methods for cooperative swarm localization rely on approximate distance metric heuristics based on properties of the communication graph. We present a new cooperative...

Pages