The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we will be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development. This video shows how we used an electric underwater field to confine the robots of a specific area around the base station so that they don’t get lost.

We use a submerged electrode below the CoCoRo surface station to generate a pulsing electric field underwater around this station. The Jeff robots have electrodes on their outer hull to be able to sense such fields. This way we can confine the robots into a specific area (volume) around the base station. This is important to keep the swarm together in the water, otherwise robots can get lost. We first tested this system in a pool, as it is shown in this video here.

To learn more about the project, see this introductory post, or check out all the videos from the Year of CoCoRo on Robohub.

This video shows tethered quadrocopters flying steadily together at high speeds exceeding 50 km/h in a confined space. With the tether exerting more than 13 gs of centripetal force, multiple quadrotors are able to fly 1.7m- radius circular trajectories in formation across different orientations in space and then successfully perform a coordinated braking maneuver.

The testbed allows the quadrocopter’s high speed flight behavior to be characterized in order to determine drag characteristics, propeller efficiency, and the physical limits of the machine. It is also being used to safely develop high-speed maneuvers such as emergency braking.

Note that it is possible to remove the central pole by balancing the forces acting on the strings; this could be then used in performance settings, possibly enhanced by light and sound effects.

This research was conducted at the Flying Machine Arena at ETH Zurich.

Reference:

Maximilian Schulz, Federico Augugliaro, Robin Ritz, Raffaello D’Andrea , “High-speed, Steady Flight with a Quadrocopter in a Confined Environment Using a Tether “, IROS 2015, submitted.

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

The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we will be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development. This video shows how we used an electric underwater field in Livorno harbour to field test confining the robots to a specific area around the base station so that they don’t get lost.

After having tested the electric-field confinement of the Jeff robots to the base station in our pool, we went out to Livorno harbour to test it under out-of-the-lab conditions. Although our CoCoRo prototype robots were not designed to operate in salty ocean water — there is a significantly different electrical conductivity compared to freshwater — the electrical confinement worked there quite well.

To learn more about the project, see this introductory post, or check out all the videos from the Year of CoCoRo on Robohub.

The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we will be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development. This video shows the Jeff robots docking and undocking autonomously with the surface station.

For the sake of achieving long-term energy autonomy with our CoCoRo system, we constructed a docking/undocking mechanism for Jeff robots on our surface station. This functionality was first tested with a fixed mounted docking device, and then with a docking device floating around in our pool. The autonomous docking worked exceptionally well under all conditions.

To learn more about the project, see this introductory post, or check out all the videos from the Year of CoCoRo on Robohub.

The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we’ll be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development. This video shows a set of experiments that investigate the capability of the relay chain (formed by Lily robots) to transmit (relay) information between two spatially separated places.

At one of these places we trigger a special RF (radio frequency) pulse to be emitted by a robot. Neighboring robots that receive this pulse send out a similar pulse, relaying the signal along the chain. To control the directionality of the spreading signal, there is also a refractory period after each relaying act in which the robot is unreceptive for the relayed signal. This system is inspired by slime mold amoebas and giant honeybees and serves very well for the underwater communication purpose.

The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we’ll be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development. Over the last four posts we demonstrated how the robots use a relay chain to communicate between the sea ground and the surface station. The following two videos show an alternative to this communication principle. The “relay swarm” scenario uses a swarm of Lily robots performing random walks in 3D for transmitting information about the status of the search swarm of Jeff robots on the ground. 

This first video explains the scenario in a computer animation:

The second video shows the real-world experiments performed in the “relay swarm” scenario. First Jeff robots search the ground of a fragmented habitat for a magnetic target. As soon as it finds the target it signals this locally with blue-light LEDs. Lily robots that also roam the habitat can pick up the signal from this Jeff robot. The info can also spread from Lily robot to Lily robot as they meet, spreading like an infectious process. Finally, Lily robots inform the surface station that the Jeff robot on the ground has found an interesting target. Future extensions foresee that after informing the surface station another phase starts: a second signal spreads from the surface station through the Lily robots back to the Jeff robot on the ground, and ultimately makes the Jeff robot to go up to the surface above the found target.

In this wide ranging interview, Danica Kragic, professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden, and General Chair of ICRA 2016, discusses the nature of collaborative research, shares her opinions on the robotics projects financed by Horizon2020, speculates on the reasons behind the different research agendas for robotics in the US, the EU and in Asia, and tells us why she chooses to publish her team’s research in open access publications.

Kragic underlines the importance of good organisation when it comes to promoting interdisciplinarity among scientific fields, and incentives to attract students in taking up robotics, and shares her views on why robotics is so often negatively portrayed in the media. Finally, will robots be as intelligent as humans? Watch the latest IJARS video to find out.

Danica Kragic is a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Communication at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH. She received her MSc in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Rijeka, Croatia, in 1995 and PhD in Computer Science from KTH in 2001. She has been a visiting researcher at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University and INRIA Rennes. She is the Director of the Centre for Autonomous Systems. Danica received the 2007 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Young Academy of Sweden. She holds a Honorary Doctorate from the Lappeenranta University of Technology. She chaired IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Computer and Robot Vision and served as an IEEE RAS AdCom member. Her research is in the area of robotics, computer vision and machine learning. In 2012, she received an ERC Starting Grant. Her research is supported by the EU, Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and Swedish Research Council.

Kragic D. IJARS Video Series: Danica Kragic Interview with the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015, 12:V7. DOI: 10.5772/61490

Robots in Depth is a new video series featuring interviews with researchers, entrepreneurs, VC investors, and policy makers in robotics, hosted by Per Sjöborg. In this first episode, Per speaks to Gregory Dudek, Research Director of the McGill Mobile Robotics Lab, about field robotics. They discuss air, surface and underwater vehicles, and review challenges and best practices for using field robots, both individually and as a collaborative team.

Robots in Depth is recorded at different robotics events around the world. You can support Robots in Depth on Patreon.

This video shows how a robot team can work together to map and navigate toward a goal in an unknown terrain that may change over time. Using an onboard monocular camera, a flying robot first scouts the area, creating both a map of visual features for simultaneous localization and a dense elevation map of the environment. A legged ground robot then localizes itself against the global map, and uses the elevation map to plan a traversable path to a goal.

While following the planned path, the absolute pose corrections are fused with the legged robot’s state estimation and the elevation map is continuously updated with distance measurements from an onboard laser range sensor. This allows the legged robot to safely navigate towards its goal while taking into account any changes in the environment.

More info: http://leggedrobotics.ethz.ch

This work was published as:
P. Fankhauser, M. Bloesch, P. Krüsi, R. Diethelm, M. Wermelinger, T. Schneider, M. Dymczyk, M. Hutter, and R. Siegwart, “Collaborative Navigation for Flying and Walking Robots,” in IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2016.

Robots in Depth is a new video series featuring interviews with researchers, entrepreneurs, VC investors, and policy makers in robotics, hosted by Per Sjöborg. In this interview, Per talks to Melonee Wise, lifelong robot builder and developer, and CEO of Fetch Robotics.

Melonee shares how she first got into building things at a young age and how that led to studying mechanical engineering and leaving her PhD project behind to become the second employee of Willow Garage. She shares some personal anecdotes from the first few years at Willow Garage, including both successes like the PR2 and some less successful moments.

Melonee also gives her perspective on the development phase robotics is in now and what the remaining challenges are. Related to that, she discusses what is feasible to deliver in the next five years vs. what her dream robot would be.

You can support Robots in Depth on Patreon. Check out all the Robots in Depth videos here.

StarlETH is a multi-purpose legged transporter robot developed at ETH Zurich’s Autonomous Systems Lab. Combining versatility, speed, robustness, and efficiency, StarlETH walks, climbs, and runs over varied terrain.

Precisely controlled elastic actuators allow for temporary energy storage – in fact this robotic system consumes 10 times less power than other hydraulic systems. Weighing in at just 26 kg, it can be handled by a single operator, but operates autonomously at a speed of 2km per hour walking or running. Potential applications for such a highly mobile robot include: inspection of industrial, construction, or polluted environments, search and rescue operations, security, or even the entertainment industry.

Further reading:
http://www.leggedrobotics.ethz.ch/doku.php?id=robots:starleth:starleth
http://www.leggedrobotics.ethz.ch/doku.php?id=robots:scarleth
http://www.leggedrobotics.ethz.ch/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=robots:starleth:description:201401_descriptiontransporter.pdf

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

• Air and ground robot collaborate to map and safely navigate unknown, changing terrain
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See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we’ll be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development. This week’s video shows an autonomous swarm of underwater robots coordinating their motion to form coherent shoals.

The body shape of Jeff robots is much closer to that of a fish than the Lily robots are. With their slim bodies, Jeff robots can tightly flock together and move in one direction as a group. We implemented a simple blue-light-LED-based algorithm that allows neighboring robots to align to each other. This doesn’t work 100% of the time, but it still works quite often. And when we filmed the little fish that observed our experiments with robots in Livorno harbor (see at beginning of the movie), we observed that the natural fish also did not align 100% of the time. In other words, we came pretty close.

We implemented this code in a very short period of time (hours!) towards the end of the project. With more time and more local neighbor communication, the shoaling can be much improved in future. We hope to be able to further extend this in our follow up project, subCULTron.

Credit: ETH Zurich / Alessandro Della Bella

In 21 countries across the globe, hundreds of people are preparing for Cybathlon 2016, where cutting edge robotic assistive technologies will help people with disabilities to compete in a series of races. This summer the Cybathlon practice session took place at the Swiss Arena in Kloten so that the teams could test out the courses. Watch the trailer for the rehearsal games!

Cybathlon 2016 is organised by ETH Zurich and will showcase six disciplines:

• BCI Race Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) Bike Race
• Powered Arm Prosthesis Race
• Powered Leg Prosthesis Race
• Powered Exoskeleton Race
• Powered Wheelchair Race

The finals will take place on October 8, 2016.

Find out more at www.cybathlon.com

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

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• Novel robots for gait and arm rehabilitation: Interview with Robert Riener
• Control strategies for active lower extremity prosthetics and orthotics
• Registration now open for Cybathlon 2016
• Noonee: The chairless Chair

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

Check out this great little film by drone startup PRENAV, which took home the LOL WTF prize at the Flying Robot International Film Festival last night. According to Nathan Schuett, CEO of PRENAV, the team was looking for a way to demonstrate precision drone flight in a visually appealing way. “We decided to try something that had never been done before – drawing accurate shapes, letters and animations in the sky with a drone – and we’re very pleased with how ‘Hello World’ turned out.” Fun stuff.

According to a recent press release,

PRENAV and partner Hawk Aerial today announced that they have been granted the first Section 333 exemptions from the Federal Aviation Administration to operate the PRENAV precision drone system.  PRENAV drones are capable of autonomously navigating in complex, cluttered, or GPS-denied environments.  The two companies plan to use the system to perform close proximity visual inspections of cell phone towers, wind turbines, bridges, oil tankers, industrial boilers, and other large structures. 

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

• From sideshow to main event, drones are making their mark in entertainment
• Self-flying drone dips, darts and dives through trees at 30 mph: Video demo

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

In March 2014, we exhibited CoCoRo in Hannover, Germany at the CEBIT — Europe’s largest consumer electronics fair. At first we thought we might be out of place and that our exhibit would be overshadowed by the latest flatscreen TVs, smartphones and gaming consoles. We were very wrong: though we had the smallest booth, we were overrun with thousands of people throughout the week, and television and radio crews also stopped by for interviews. By our own estimates, we may just have had the highest rate of visitors per square meter in the whole fair.

It’s not easy to bring a swarm of underwater robots and run live experiments at a consumer electronic show, but we gained a lot of motivation from the public interest we felt there. Thanks to our enduring team members and also to all the people who visited us!

The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we’ll be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development.

Most of the videos from The Year of CoCoRo were shot during workshops we held throughout the project. These workshops, which were usually focussed on one or several specific demonstrators, were what drove our international team of collaborators to implement mechanical hardware, electronics and software into working installations. This form of workshop-driven development proved to be very successful, and by the end of the project we were able to show 17 working final demonstrators that show the versatility of robot swarms. 

The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we’ll be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development.

During the past year we have shown many swarm algorithms in various experiments. The spotlight was always on the Lily and the Jeff robots. However, there is now another star in the team and this trailer is dedicated to this special agent: the base station!

The base station was finished towards the end of the project, thus, we had to develop (i.e. hack) many surrogates and placeholders for it over the course of the project. We got so experienced with it that we could quickly hack a surrogate base station from almost anything that was lying around in the lab: styrofoam, cans, boxes … whatever was around and handy. This video shows some of those creations.

A few months before the final review we had the real thing ready: a typical Italian machine (like Italian cars) made by our partners from SSSA (Pontedera). It was fast as hell, highly manoeuvrable, and elegant. The base station has a docking device and can actively manoeuvre, dock and undock robots and carry three attached spare robots with it. With this central masterpiece, we were ready for our final review.

The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we’ll be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development.

CoCoRo’s humble beginnings.

Our underwater swarm research started in a few cubic centimeters of water with some naked electronics on a table. Over the next three and a half years, our swarm increased by a factor of 40, and the size of our test waters increased by a factor of 40 million as we went from aquariums and pools, to ponds, rivers and lakes, and finally ending up in the salt water basin of the Livorno harbour. Quite a stretch for a small project!

Our new project, subCULTron, which extends the work of CoCoRo, will scale up the swarm size to 120+ robots, and will take place in an even larger body of water: the Venice Lagoon.

The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we’ll be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development. 

As the worldwide leader in collaborative robotics research and education, Rethink Robotics is excited to announce the winner of the inaugural Rethink Robotics Video Challenge. Launched in the summer of 2015, the Challenge was created to highlight the amazing work being done by the research and education community with the Baxter robot. With more than 90 total entries from 19 countries around the globe, the Humans to Robots Lab at Brown University was a standout in the criteria of relevancy, innovation and breadth of impact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a holiday robot video of your own that you’d like to share? Send your submissions to info [at] robohub.org!

Autonomous Systems Lab and Robotics Systems Lab at ETHZ:

This is what happens when a robot wishes for Christmas!

Department of Advanced Robotics (ADVR) at IIT:

Made from the many robots we built at the iCub facility and the ADVR department at ITT.

Want to watch them all? Check out the full playlist on Youtube here: