Robots / Platforms Archives - The Robot Report

Agility Robotics’ Jonathan Hurst to keynote Robotics Summit

Brianna Wessling — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 18:07:02 +0000

Agility Robotics has been working since it spun out of Oregon State University in 2015 to bring humanoid robots out of the lab and into the real world. The company has made great strides in making its robots fit for bulk material handling tasks like tote movement.

Earlier this year, the company unveiled the latest generation of its Digit robot, built specifically to carry out tasks in warehouses and distribution centers. Updates in the next generation include newly designed end effectors optimized for reaching high/low, pulling, picking up, and placing objects commonly found in e-commerce and shipping warehouses, like plastic totes. Digit also has a new head with LED animated eyes, which allow for improved human-robot interaction such as using simple expressions to convey information and intent.

In his keynote talk at the Robotics Summit & Expo titled “Developing Human-Centric Bipedal Robots,” Agility co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Jonathan W. Hurst will give an inside look at the process of developing bipedal robots that are useful in the workplace. The Robotics Summit will take place at the Boston Convention Center on May 10-11, 2023, and Hurst will give his talk at 10:45 AM on the show’s second day.

Hurst is also a Professor and co-founder of the Oregon State University Robotics Institute. He holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering and an M.S. and Ph.D. in robotics, all from Carnegie Mellon University. His university research focuses on understanding the fundamental science and engineering best practices for robotic-legged locomotion and physical interaction. Agility Robotics is bringing this new robotic mobility to market, solving customer problems, working towards a day when robots can go where people go, generate greater productivity across the economy, and improve the quality of life for all.

You can find the full agenda for the Robotics Summit here. The Robotics Summit & Expo is the premier event for commercial robotics developers. There will be nearly 70 industry-leading speakers sharing their development expertise on stage during the conference, with 150-plus exhibitors on the show floor showcasing their latest enabling technologies, products and services that help develop commercial robots. There also will be a career fair, networking opportunities and more.

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Comau develops mobile manipulator

Brianna Wessling — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 20:55:37 +0000

Comau’s mobile manipulator uses a Racer-5 cobot and a 1500 autonomous guided vehicle (AGV). | Source: Comau

Comau has been developing a mobile manipulator that is being applied within three different EU projects.

The company’s Mobile Robotic Arm involves a robotic arm mounted on an autonomous mobile platform. The system is integrated with Comau’s Racer-5 collaborative robot (cobot), a six-axis articulated robotic arm that can work at speeds of up to 6 m/s when human operators aren’t present. The Racer-5 is mounted onto a 1500 autonomous guided vehicle (AGV).

The system can be integrated within Comau’s digital infrastructure and can provide visual feedback for pick and place operations, and more, with its integrated vision system. This includes a Comau MI.RA that is installed directly into the robotic arm.

The system’s AGV is equipped with two independent batteries that power the AGV and the robotic arm separately. The AGV can also be managed using different types of navigation modes and a standard Comau controller.

Comau’s first application for the Mobile Robotic Arm is with DIMOFAC, an EU initiative that aims to help companies implement a smart factory architecture. There, the platform is used for pick and place and warehouse automation tasks within a machining scenario.

The PeneloPe Project, another EU project, uses the platform for glue dispensing and non-destructive quality inspection in the public transport domain. The goal of the program is to develop a closed-loop, end-to-end digital manufacturing solution that facilitates bidirectional data flows across the manufacturing value chain.

Finally, Comau’s platform is being used as part of the ODIN project to support the manipulation of mechanical parts for automotive applications with the aim of demonstrating the technical and performance feasibility of collaborative robotics on the factory floor.

Earlier this year, Comau entered into a cooperative agreement with Siemens to offer their jointly engineered product the Sinumerik Run MyRobot / DirectControl. With this product, robot kinematics can be fully integrated into a CNC system, optimizing control of all robotic machining and handling tasks.

Comau is based in Turin, Italy and was founded in 1973. It recently launched a new robotics learning center with Ferrari. The e.DO Learning Center will use Comau’s robots to help students explore STEM subjects, coding and robotics. The facility is equipped with five of Comau’s e.DO 6-axis robots, complete with all necessary materials and accessories.

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Cruise recalls 300 robotaxis in response to crash with bus

Brianna Wessling — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 13:21:24 +0000

A Cruise robotaxi failed to brake quickly enough behind a city bus in San Francisco. | Source: Cruise

Cruise issued a voluntary recall with the National Highway Transporation Safety Administration (NHTSA) in response to a minor collision where a Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) hit the back of a San Francisco bus. The recall affects 300 AVs.

The Cruise AV involved in the crash failed to brake quickly enough after the city bus in front of it slowed, according to the company. While the vehicle did brake, it applied the brakes too late and rear-ended the bus at about 10 MPH, Cruise said.

After the collision, Cruise began an investigation and found the cause of the crash was an error related to predicting the movement of articulated vehicles, which are vehicles with two sections connected by a flexible joint allowing them to bend in the middle, like the bus in the accident.

According to Cruise, the robotaxi saw the front section of the bus and recognized that it was an articulated vehicle that could bend, so it predicted the bus would move as connected sections with the rear section following the predicted path of the front section. As the bus pulled out, Cruise said the AV reacted based on the predicted actions of the front end of the bus, which it could no longer see, rather than the actual actions of the rear section of the bus, making it slow to brake.

Once the company found the root cause of the accident, it started working on a software update that it said would improve performance near articulated vehicles. When the update was completed, tested and validated, Cruise’s operations team rolled the change out to the fleet, just two days after the incident occurred. Results from testing indicate the specific issue that caused the accident won’t recur after the update.

“Our data and simulations showed that it was exceptionally rare. At the time of the incident, our AVs had driven over 1 million miles in fully driverless mode. We had no other collisions related to this issue, and extensive simulation showed that similar incidents were extremely unlikely to occur at all, even under very similar conditions,” Cruise founder and CEO Kyle Vogt wrote in a blog. “The collision occurred due to a unique combination of specific parameters such as the specific position of the vehicles when the AV approached the bus (with both sections of the bus visible initially, and then only one section), the AV’s speed, and the timing of the bus’s deceleration (within only a few seconds of the front section becoming occluded).

“We will undoubtedly continue to discover ways in which we can improve, even if that involves changing software that is currently deployed in the field,” he continued. “We think any potential improvement to roadway safety is worthwhile, and we will approach it with the same level of rigor as we’ve demonstrated here. These continuous improvements are likely to make voluntary recalls commonplace. We believe this is one of the great benefits of autonomous vehicles compared to human drivers; our entire fleet of AVs is able to rapidly improve, and we are able to carefully monitor that progress over time.”

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Gatik to start deliveries with Kroger in Texas

Brianna Wessling — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 10:06:38 +0000

Gatik recently announced a multi-year commercial collaboration with Kroger to transport customer orders within Kroger’s Dallas distribution network.

Starting sometime in Q2 of 2023, Gatik’s medium-duty autonomous box trucks will be transporting products from a Kroger Customer Fulfillment Center (CFC) in Dallas, Texas to multiple retail locations. Gatik’s autonomous trucks will operate with safety drivers in the vehicles for now, but the company plans to eventually take them out.

Gatik’s trucks feature a cold chain-capable 20′ foot box to transport ambient, refrigerated, frozen goods. The collaboration involves consistent, repeated delivery runs multiple times per day, seven days per week, across Kroger’s Dallas distribution network. Each trip, from a CFC to a retail location, typically involves around 60 miles of driving round trip, according to Gatik’s Head of Policy and Communications Richard Steiner.

The company has always been interested in automating the middle mile. Steiner joined the company in 2019, just two years after it was founded, and has helped it grow into a now 150-person team.

“What we’ve seen over the last few years, even prior to the pandemic, is e-commerce going through the roof,” Steiner said. “Consumers like you and me no longer want to wait three, four, or five days for goods, we want them within a one to two-hour pickup window.”

According to Steiner, this change in the way people shop has led to smaller distribution centers, more micro fulfillment centers and more customer fulfillment centers closer to where those customers live. This is where automating the middle mile, between these fulfillment centers and retail locations, can greatly increase the speed and number of orders fulfilled.

“A really, really critical point to note about what we’re doing there is we’re increasing the delivery frequency,” Steiner said. “So that means that Kroger’s customers have a greater range of same-day pickup times as well as greater flexibility with cut-off times to place their orders.”

Automating the middle mile also means getting autonomy into the hands of Gatik’s customers quickly, because the team only needs to operate its AVs on repeatable routes instead of anywhere in a city a person might want to go.

“Compared to the other applications of technology, either long haul or passenger transportation, [middle-mile transportation] is simpler,” Steiner said. “We are constraining the challenge of autonomy by focusing on fixed known repeatable point-to-point routes. So whereas the passenger transportation models require mapping out an exponentially larger and larger geo-fenced area to serve an increasing number of consumers . . . We focus on a limited number of pickup locations and drop off locations, which means that we know our routes more intimately than anyone else on the planet.”

While Gatik doesn’t have a specific timeline for when it will be able to pull out its safety drivers from its trucks in Texas, with each deployment, including its deployment with Walmart in Arkansas and with Loblaw in Ontario, the process keeps moving faster.

“With Walmart in Arkansas, we began commercial operations in June of 2019. We pulled the driver out in August of 2021, so about two years right?” Steiner said. “With Loblaw, we began commercial operations in January 2020 and pulled the safety driver out 19 months after that. So we went from 24, 25 months to 19.”

Gatik has three phases that it works through for deployments. The first involves millions of miles of simulated training, which is followed by the second phase, which involves private closed course track testing, first with safety drivers and then without. Finally, the Gatik team moves into its public testing phase.

With or without a safety driver, Gatik’s trucks begin generating revenue for its customers on day one.

“We’ve now done over half a million customers orders across our customer base in North America,” Steiner said. “Every single one of those deliveries has been revenue generating. So we’re not testing for testing’s sake. This is a real business. This is a revenue-generating business.”

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MIT researchers create algorithm to stop drones from colliding midair

Brianna Wessling — Sat, 08 Apr 2023 14:00:32 +0000

The MIT team tested its collision avoidance system in a flight environment with six drones and in simulation. | Source: MIT

A research team from MIT created a trajectory-planning system called Robust MADER that can allow drones working together in the same airspace to pick safe paths forward without crashing into each other. The algorithm is an updated version of MADER, a 2020 project that worked well in simulation but didn’t hold up in real-world testing.

The original MADER system involved each agent broadcasting its trajectory so fellow drones know where it’s planning to go. In simulation, this worked without problems, with all drones considering each other’s trajectories when planning their own. When put to the test, the team found that it didn’t take into account delays in communication between drones, resulting in unexpected collisions.

“MADER worked great in simulations, but it hadn’t been tested in hardware. So, we built a bunch of drones and started flying them. The drones need to talk to each other to share trajectories, but once you start flying, you realize pretty quickly that there are always communication delays that introduce some failures,” Kota Kondo, an aeronautics and astronautics graduate student, said.

Robust MADER is able to generate collision-free trajectories for drones even when there is a delay in communications between agents. The system is an asynchronous, decentralized, multiagent trajectory planner, meaning each drone formulates its own trajectory and then checks with drones nearby to ensure it won’t run into any of them.

The drones optimize their new trajectories using an algorithm that incorporates the trajectories they received from nearby drones, and agents constantly optimize and broadcast new trajectories to avoid collisions.

To get around any delays in sharing trajectories, every drone has a delay-check period, where it spends a fixed amount of time repeatedly checking for communications from other agents to see if its new trajectory is safe. If it finds a possible collision, it abandons the new trajectory and keeps going on its current one. The length of this delay-check period depends on the distance between agents and other environmental factors that could hamper communications.

While the system does require all drones to agree on each new trajectory, they don’t all have to agree at the same time, making it a scalable system. It could be used in any situation where multiple drones are working together in the same airspace like spraying pesticides over crops.

The MIT team ran hundreds of simulations in which they artificially introduced communication delays, and found that MADER was 100% successful at avoiding collisions. When tested with six drones and two aerial obstacles in a flight environment, Robust MADER was able to avoid all collisions, while the old algorithm would have caused seven collisions.

Moving forward, the research team hopes to put Robust MADER to the test outdoors, where obstacles can affect communications. They also hope to outfit drones with visual sensors so they can detect other agents or obstacles, predict their movements and include that information in trajectory optimizations.

Kota Konda wrote the paper with Jesus Tordesillas, a postdoc; Parker C. Lusk, a graduate student; Reinaldo Figueroa, Juan Rached, and Joseph Merkel, MIT undergraduates; and senior author Jonathan P. How, the Richard C. Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. This work was supported by Boeing Research and Technology.

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Yaskawa releases MotoPick 4 software & robotic pallet builder

The Robot Report Staff — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 22:20:01 +0000

Yaskawa’s Pallet Builder extension (left) and a Yaskawa robot using the company’s new MotoPick 4 software (right). | Source: Yaskawa

Yaskawa released its MotoPick 4 software system that adds no-code capabilities for high-speed pick and place. The company is also expanding its Smart Pendant’s capability with its new Pallet Builder extension.

With the building blocks to create systems for up to 16 robots and up to 6 conveyors or 16 tables per robot, the Yaskawa MotoPick 4 software can synchronize multiple robots equipped with vision to pick fast-moving products off a conveyor and place them on an outfeed device, tray or box in an organized arrangement.

MotoPick 4 provides precise control and coordination for conveyor speed, accommodating tracking speeds up to 1 M/sec. If the advancement of either the infeed or outfeed conveyor falls behind, the software can be configured with an area that slows or stops conveyors until the operation is equalized. Additionally, the software features a pause function that allows for the system to be paused and later resumed without losing track of item positions.

Dynamic load balancing for single or multiple robot systems is accommodated. The ability to asynchronously pick up to four parts with multiple placements per cycle is also offered, with up to 32 different product types to be easily picked and sorted. The gripper is allowed up to eight zones.

Supporting multiple encoders and cameras, a robot interface board reduces the integration wiring and panel real estate required for multiple robot cells. Cameras are supported based on conveyor width, workpiece size, target accuracy, production volume and conveyor speed, and they do not need to be aligned in a pre-defined way.

Multi-layer tray support allows multiple-layer pattern picking or placing with trays. MotoPick 4 is compatible with the FS100 and YRC1000micro controllers, as well as the MLX300 controller software solution.

Pallet Builder

Expanding the Smart Pendant capability, Pallet Builder enables the development and deployment of palletizing cells. Designed for single pick-and-place tasks, this user interface uses a robust database and guided prompts to facilitate no-code programming for work cell configuration and pallet pattern setup.

Designed for small- to medium-sized enterprises with high-mix, low-to-medium-volume production that may have insufficient access to experienced robot programmers, Pallet Builder provides general functions for cell definition, gripper definition, and single pick and place jobs. Multiple infeeds, build stations and dispenser stations (for slip sheet separators) support up to eight combined stations.

Job editing is available for specific system requirements. Pallet Builder can accommodate a variety of grippers and end-of-arm tooling and adjusts for product variation. Capable software includes multiple automatic pattern styles as well as full custom pattern support. Single drop positions with selectable label orientation are also available.

Compatible with the YRC1000 and YRC1000 micro controllers, Pattern Builder is available as a complimentary download for use with GP-series and HC-series robots. Smart Pendant V3.0 or newer is required.

Yaskawa Motoman launched its newest robot in the PL-series line, the PL800, in October 2022. This industrial robot features an 800 kg (2,140 lb) payload capacity and is designed for a variety of palletizing applications, layer picking, and other logistical tasks for end-of-line or distribution automation.

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How Geek+ robots could’ve picked 10B items in a year

Mike Oitzman — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 20:58:38 +0000

Geek+ P-series robots handle storage shelving then queue and present items for picking to humans. | Credit: Geek+

Geek+ recently announced its combined worldwide fleet of P-series goods-to-person (GTP) workflow robots picked ten billion items over the past year. The GTP picking solutions deployed around the world covered over 175 million km during the period, according to the company, which is further than the distance from the Earth to the sun.

Yong Zheng, Founder and CEO of Geek+, said: “We are very proud of what we have achieved recently. The amount of merchandise that our robots have handled, coupled with the savings in time and energy, demonstrate that mobile robots are a technology for today’s problems and a brighter future.”

Each day, the number of items managed by Geek+ GTP robots and warehouse management systems reached as much as 750 million, according to the company.

This is a significant milestone for a fleet of robots. In researching this claim, we reached out to the company to inquire about the deployed number of GTP robots used to reach this milestone.

In the U.S., Geek+ said it has deployed more than 4,000 robots in 24 locations since 2019. Worldwide, the company said it has deployed an additional 26,000 robots for a total worldwide fleet of 30,000 robots. We used that final figure in the calculation of this milestone.

With all of the data in hand, each robot needed to pick an average of 1.5 items per minute and drive at an average speed of 440 mm/sec (well within the technical and operating specifications of the robots).

The table below contains output from the spreadsheet that we generated to validate these claims. A company representative stated that the formula for calculating the items picked number was calculated using the average tasks picked per hour * average pieces per task * 10 working hours per day * operating robot * operating period.

Table 1 – Calculations for Geek+ robots (initial conditions in bold)

*Items picked per year:**	10,000,000,000
*Working hours per day:**	10
*Kilometers driven:**	175,000,000
*Robots:**	30,000
Units picked per robot per day:	913
Units picked per robot per hour:	91
Units picked per robot per minute:	1.52
Meters driven per robot per year:	5,833,333
Meters driven per robot per day:	15,982
Meters driven per robot per hour:	1,598.20
Average speed (m/s):	0.44

*data provided by Geek+

Over the past year, Geek+ has added new projects and expanded its collaboration with existing clients while continuing to evolve the complete solution. The company optimized Geek+’s warehouse management systems to boost robot efficiency by 15%. Geek+ said it plans to continue to improve and enhance its technology and expects further gains in sustainability and efficiency in 2023.

In 2022, Geek+ secured partnerships to expand into Canada and Brazil. Also, Geek+ has expanded its operations by adding a 1400m2 experience center and two new offices in North America, with over 100 employees.

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Researchers taught a quadruped to use its legs for manipulation

Brianna Wessling — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:39:18 +0000

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and UC Berkeley want to give quadrupeds more capabilities similar to their biological counterparts. Just like real dogs can use their front legs for things other than walking and running, like digging and other manipulation tasks, the researchers think quadrupeds could someday do the same.

Currently, we see quadrupeds use their legs as just legs to navigate their surroundings. Some of them, like Boston Dynamics’ Spot, get around these limitations by adding a robotic arm to the quadruped’s back. This arm allows Spot to manipulate things, like opening doors and pressing buttons, while maintaining the flexibility that four legs give locomotion.

However, the researchers at CMU and UC Berkeley taught a Unitree Go1 quadruped, equipped with an Intel RealSense camera for perception, how to use its front legs to climb walls, press buttons, kick a soccer ball and perform other object interactions in the real world, on top of teaching it how to walk.

The team started this challenging task by decoupling the skill learning into two broad categories: locomotion, which involves movements like walking or climbing a wall, and manipulation, which involves using one leg to interact with objects while balancing on three legs. Decoupling these tasks help the quadruped to simultaneously move to stay balanced and manipulate objects with one leg.

By training in simulation, the team taught the quadruped these skills and transferred them to the real world with their proposed sim2real variant. This variant builds upon recent locomotion success.

All of these skills are combined into a robust long-term plan by teaching the quadruped a behavior tree that encodes a high-level task hierarchy from one clean expert demonstration. This allows the quadruped to move through the behavior tree and return to its last successful movement when it runs into problems with certain branches of the behavior tree.

For example, if a quadruped is tasked with pressing a button on a wall but fails to climb up the wall, it returns to the last task it did successfully, like approaching the wall, and starts there again.

The research team was made up of Xuxin Cheng, a Master’s student in robotics at CMU, Ashish Kumar, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, and Deepak Pathak, an assistant professor at CMU in Computer Science. You can read their technical paper “Legs as Manipulator: Pushing Quadrupedal Agility Beyond Locomotion” (PDF) to learn more. They said a limitation of their work is that they decoupled high-level decision making and low-level command tracking, but that a full end-to-end solution is “an exciting future direction.”

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Watch Bill Gates take a ride in a Wayve AV

Brianna Wessling — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 23:08:02 +0000

Bill Gates recently had the opportunity to take a ride in London inside a Wayve autonomous vehicle (AV) and gave his thoughts on the future of driving in a new Gates Notes blog post.

While most AVs work by extensively mapping out the areas they drive in, Wayve uses deep learning techniques to allow its cars to drive anywhere humans can. To train its software, Wayve uses hundreds of millions of data samples of real-world and simulated driving.

Last year, Wayve announced it was working with Microsoft, which Gates co-founded, to leverage the supercomputing infrastructure needed to support the development of AI-based models for AVs on a global scale. Microsoft also participated in the company’s $200 million funding round in January 2022.

The Wayve AV was able to safely navigate the busy streets of downtown London with a safety driver present behind the wheel.

In his blog post, Gates seemed cautiously optimistic about the future of AVs. He predicted that it’s likely the AV industry will reach a tipping point between SAE level 2 and 3 vehicles, or, in other words, vehicles that can only provide assistance to drivers through autonomous features, and vehicles that take the control out of the drivers’ hands.

“Over the next decade, we’ll start to see more vehicles crossing this threshold. AVs are rapidly reaching the point where almost all of the technology required has been invented. Now, the focus is on refining algorithms and perfecting the engineering,” Gates wrote in his post. “There have been huge advances in recent years—especially in sensors, which scan the surrounding environment and tell the vehicle about things it needs to react to, like pedestrians crossing the street or another driver who swerves into your lane.”

Gates predicts that the first AVs that will see widespread adoption will be for long-haul trucking, then deliveries, and then autonomous taxis and rental cars will become common.

Widespread adoption of AVs, however, will come with other issues. For example, when an AV is involved in an accident, insurance companies will have to determine if the blame falls on the passenger or the company that programmed the car software. Gates predicts that these kinds of changes, along with regulatory changes, could take decades to fully come to fruition.

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Keys to using ROS 2 & other frameworks for medical robots

The Robot Report Staff — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 15:24:57 +0000

What is the best architectural approach to use when developing medical robots? Is it ROS, ROS 2 or other open-source or commercial frameworks? The upcoming Robotics Summit & Expo (May 10-11 in Boston) will explore engineering questions concerning the level of concern, risk, design controls, and evidence on a couple of different applications of these frameworks.

In a session on May 10 from 2-2:45 PM, Tom Amlicke, Software Systems Engineer, MedAcuity will discuss the “Keys to Using ROS 2 and Other Frameworks for Medical Robots.” Amlicke will look at three hypothetical robotic systems and explore these approaches:

1. An application based on the da Vinci Research Kit through regulatory clearance
2. ROS as test tools to verify the software requirements for a visual guidance system
3. Commercial off-the-shelve robot arm used for a medical application

If you attend his session, you will also learn how to create trade-offs with these different architectural approaches and how to validate the intended uses of these architectural approaches to ensure a successful submission package for your FDA, EMA, or other regulatory approval.

Amlicke has 20-plus years of embedded and application-level development experience. He designs and deploys enterprise, embedded, and mobile solutions on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Linux/UNIX platforms using a variety of languages including C++. Amlicke takes a lead role on complex robotics projects, overseeing end-to-end development of ROS-based mobile robots and surgical robots.

You can find the full agenda for the Robotics Summit here. The Robotics Summit & Expo is the premier event for commercial robotics developers. There will be nearly 70 industry-leading speakers sharing their development expertise on stage during the conference, with 150-plus exhibitors on the showfloor showcasing their latest enabling technologies, products and services that help develop commercial robots. There also will be a career fair, networking opportunities and more.

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Collaborative Robotics Training Days examines state of industry

The Robot Report Staff — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 14:08:33 +0000

Collaborative robots (cobots) are one of the fastest-growing types of industrial robotics. The cobot market is moving so fast it is often difficult for current and potential end-users to keep up with the latest developments.

Collaborative Robotics Training Days is here to help. The educational series will provide a snapshot of the current state of the sector, including new capabilities, powerful enabling technologies, and real-world case studies about emerging and established cobot applications. Hearing from some of the best minds in the market, attendees will learn how to select, program, deploy, and manage collaborative robots.

A detailed agenda can be found below. Again, interested attendees can register here for free.

Collaborative Robots and Intelligent Motion Control
Speaker: Prabh Gowrisankaran, VP of Engineering & Strategy, Performance Motion Devices
March 29 at 2 PM Eastern

This session will focus on servo actuators that function as end effectors. Understanding their capabilities and properties will help ensure that your next application delivers the goods without dropping the ball.

10 Point Checklist to Benchmark Your Cobot Supplier
Speaker: Joe Campbell, Head of Strategic Marketing, Universal Robots
April 5 at 2 PM Eastern

Collaborative robots make up the fastest-growing segment of the robotics industry, thanks to their affordability and fast deployment compared to traditional robots. But not all manufacturing processes have the same outlook for cobot automation, and not all cobot suppliers are created equal.

6-Axis, SCARA or Collaborative: How to Pick the Right Robot
Speaker: Patrick Varley, Product Marketing Manager (Mechatronics), Mitsubishi Electric Automation
April 12 at 2 PM Eastern

There is a great deal of “noise” in the robotics community, as well as in the business and investment press. This results in increased risk, missed opportunities, and confusion among all members of the collaborative robotics value chain. The problem is especially acute during the selection process for collaborative robotics systems.

Palletizing and Depalletizing Using Collaborative Robots
April 25 at 2 PM Eastern

Palletizing and depalletizing are two of the most common processes in material handling. Collaborative robotics systems have proven to be very adept for palletizing and depalletizing work, protecting workers from repetitive motion injuries and reducing costs in the process.

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How Amazon Astro moves through its environment

Brianna Wessling — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 22:35:17 +0000

Amazon recently detailed how Astro, the company’s multi-purpose home robot, can navigate through its environment with limited onboard computational capabilities. Astro’s sensor field of view and onboard computational capabilities aren’t nearly as powerful as other autonomous robots. While this makes it a more affordable option for consumers, it also means it’s more challenging for Amazon to deliver a high-quality of motion.

Amazon counteracts Astro’s lack of computation capabilities with algorithms and software designed to allow the robot to move more gracefully.

Predictive planning is a key aspect of Astro’s navigational abilities. Astro’s limited computational capabilities mean it struggles with a large sensing-to-actuation latency. To combat this, Astro makes predictions about the movements of the objects around it, like people. The robot predicts where those objects will be and what its surroundings will look like at the end of its current planning cycle, helping it to account for latencies in sensing and mapping while it’s moving.

All of Astro’s plans are based on its latest sensor data and what it thinks its surroundings will look like when its plan will be taking effect. The robot can make these predictions because of its ability to predict and handle uncertainties and risks of collisions.

Astro’s motivation to move towards its goal is always weighed dynamically with its perceived level of uncertainty. This means Astro evaluates uncertainty-adjusted progress for each candidate motion, allowing it to focus on getting to its goal when it determines risk is low, and focus on evasion when risk is high.

The robot also uses trajectory optimization software to operate in its environment. Astro considers multiple candidate trajectories and picks the best one in each planning cycle. The robot plans 10 times a second and evaluates a few hundred trajectory candidates in each instance.

Astro considers safety, smoothness of motion and progress toward its end goal. With these three criteria, the robot picks the trajectory that will result in optimal behavior. Other approaches limit the number of choices a robot can make to a discrete set, or a state lattice, but Amazon’s formulation is continuous, helping the robot move smoothly.

Astro doesn’t just have to plan where its two wheels and body will go, it also has to plan movements for Astro’s screen. The robot’s screen is used to communicate motion and intent and for active perception, so Astro plans to do things like orienting its screen towards the person it’s following or in the direction it plans to go so humans around it know what its plans are.

Amazon released Astro in September 2021. The robot can be used for a variety of things, including home monitoring, videoconferencing with family and friends, entertaining children, and more. The voice-controllable robot can recognize faces, deliver items to specific people, after a human puts the item in the storage bin, and use third-party accessories to, for example, record blood pressure. It can detect the sound of a smoke alarm, carbon monoxide detector or breaking glass. If you have a Ring account, Astro can send you notifications if it notices something unusual.

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Cruise robotaxi, SF bus involved in accident

Brianna Wessling — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 20:53:36 +0000

Last Thursday, March 23, 2023, a Cruise robotaxi, operating autonomously and with no driver or passengers in the vehicle, was involved in a minor accident with a San Francisco Muni bus. No one was injured in the incident. Both the Cruise vehicle and Muni bus received some damages, with the robotaxi seeming to take the brunt of the impact, according to Forbes.

While there aren’t many details about the accident, Cruise tweeted the following brief statement after the incident: “Yesterday, one of our vehicles made contact with the rear of a Muni bus. No injuries were reported, and there were no passengers present in the Cruise AV. We are investigating the incident and will take follow-up actions if appropriate.”

Robotaxi companies are typically quick to clear things up if their vehicles aren’t at fault in incidents. So many are assuming the Cruise robotaxi rear-ended the bus, based partly on Cruise saying in the statement one of its vehicles “made contact with the rear of a Muni bus.”

This afternoon, one of our vehicles made contact with the rear of a Muni bus. No injuries were reported, there were no passengers present in the Cruise AV, and it has been cleared from the scene.

— cruise (@Cruise) March 24, 2023

This incident happened just days after another Cruise robotaxi drove through caution tape that closed off a road where overhead trolley wires had fallen during a major high-wind storm. The vehicle hit the wires which were powered off at the time. Had the power lines been live when the vehicle hit them, the incident could have been much worse.

In December, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced it was opening an investigation into the company’s automated driving system. In a filing, NHSTA said it was interested in two different issues that had been reported to the administration that both result in the robotaxis becoming hazards for others on the road.

NHSTA’s first concern is with the company’s robotaxis reportedly braking too hard in certain circumstances. The administration received three reports of a Cruise vehicle braking too hard in response to a car approaching them quickly from the rear, resulting in the Cruise vehicle being rear-ended in all three incidents.

The administration’s second concern is with the robotaxis becoming immobilized on the road. NHSTA has received several reports of Cruise vehicles stalling on the road, with no human operators present. NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) opened a preliminary investigation to determine the scope and severity of both issues.

Last week, Cruise filed an application with the California DMV to test its robotaxis statewide. The company has been working to expand its services in several areas, including in Austin and in the suburbs of Phoenix. It’s also working to roll out its purpose-built Origin vehicle on public roads in San Francisco.

Last month, Cruise announced its fully driverless vehicles have traveled over one million miles. A majority of Cruise’s fully driverless miles were driven in San Francisco, where the company first rolled out its robotaxis in November 2021.

The Robot Report reached out to Cruise for details on both incidents but hasn’t heard back as of press time. If we do get any more information, this story will be updated.

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Relativity Space launches first 3D printed rocket

Mike Oitzman — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 19:10:54 +0000

The first 3D-printed rocket called GLHF from Relativity Space was successfully launched this week. | Credit: Relativity Space

Relativity Space successfully launched a 3D-printed rocket on Wednesday March 24, 2023. The first Terran 1 rocket called “GLHF” (Good Luck Have Fun) lifted off from launch complex 16 at Cape Canaveral. The Terran 1 is the largest 3D-printed object to be launched as a rocket.

After two prior scrubbed launch attempts over the last week, GLHF successfully lifted off from the launch pad, and reached two goals during its brief flight:

Max-Q: the point of greatest aerodynamic pressure on the rocket body
Main engine shut off: the completion of the main engine burn

The rocket failed to reach orbit in what appears to be a secondary rocket engine failure. As of press time, there is no news on the exact failure. Without the secondary engine ignition, the rocket did not have enough power to reach orbit.

Relativity Space uses industrial robots to 3D print rocket’s body

Relativity Space is innovating through the use of robotics to 3D print metal items. As shown in the video below, the company uses industrial robot arms to manage the application of welded metal to produce the rocket body and rocket motors. Rocket bodies are currently expensive to manufacture, and 3D printing them promises to reduce costs and reduce weight by creating complex shapes that require less material (by mass) than with current manufacturing methods.

Traditional methods might take 24 months to produce a rocket body, whereas 3D printing can reduce that timeframe to 2 months. Likewise, a 48-month iteration time on a complete rocket assembly can be reduced to 6 months.

The Terran 1 is designed for the future of constellation deployment and resupply. With software-driven design and the use of 3D printing, the payload part of the rocket (in the nose cone) can easily be manufactured to the specs of each individual launch client.

Ultimately, Relativity Space is planning to produce the Terran R reusable robot, further improving the ROI on rocket development as well as the cost per launch. The vision is to create a fleet of reusable rockets to support future missions to the moon, mars and beyond.

The company was founded in 2015 and has raised $1.3B to date. (Crunchbase)

Here’s the live stream of the Terran 1 rocket launch:

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ProMat 2023 robotics recap

Mike Oitzman — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 12:00:09 +0000

Editors from The Robot Report attended the 2023 ProMat event in Chicago. In episode 109 of The Robot Report Podcast, co-hosts Steve Crowe and Mike Oitzman discuss the news and stories from the event. Also in this week’s episode, Mike highlights news related to the future of AI and robotics from the recent Nvidia GTC event.

ProMat 2023 Review

New robotics companies at the show included:

Mushiny
Multiway Robotics
Quiktron
SEER
Tuskrobots
Slip Robotics
Pickle Robots

The most interesting robotics solutions at the show:

Autonomous forklifts were everywhere on the show floor
Agility Robotics demoed the latest iteration of Digit robot
RightHand Robotics’ demoed a new suction cup switcher
Boston Dynamics Stretch trailer unloading demo worked well
Slip robotics had a new, novel trailer-loading/unloading AMR-based solution
Locus One Interoperability was a key new feature of LocusOne software
Verve Motion exosuit is a solution to warehouse worker fatigue

For a complete summary of our editor’s picks for robotics at ProMat 2023, check out this story.

Robotics Summit & Expo (May 10-11) returns to Boston

NVIDIA news this week:

Omniverse Cloud for enterprises is now available as a platform as a service (PaaS) for compute-intensive workloads like synthetic data generation.
Issac ROS DP3 release adds new perception capabilities and open-source modules
New LIDAR-based grid localizer package
New people detection support in the NVBLOX package
GPU-accelerated 3D reconstruction for collision avoidance
Updated VSLAM and depth perception GEM
Source release of NITROS, NVIDIAs ROS 2 hardware acceleration implementation
New Isaac ROS benchmark suite built
The Robot Report story on Nvidia GTC
NOTEWORTHY: Fireside chat between Jenson and Ilya Sutskever, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, OpenAI (Nvidia GTC site)

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