The DelFly II from TU Delft is one of the most promising flapping wing micro UAVs we’ve seen, and at the International Micro Air Vehicle Conference and Flight Competition last week the little MAV got quite a workout. The video shows the robot flying along with a feed from the onboard camera and some of the vision algorithms being used to navigate. Especially cool is how the DelFly II actually runs into a wall at one point and bounces right back, which is one of the big advantages of a flapping wing design over a rotary wing. Also, that optic flow navigation technique is something that we’ve written about before; it replicates the way that insects navigate, using simple moving patterns to determine speed and direction relative to objects.

It’s not specified in the video what level of autonomy was used on the Delfly II… The competition permitted both full autonomy and remote control based on onboard video. At the very least, the first sequence (the figure eight around the two orange poles) seems to be completely autonomous, albeit (as far as I can tell) using a ground station to interpret the video and send steering commands to the robot.

If you think 16 grams is pretty small for an autonomous robot, don’t forget the DelFly Micro, which weighs just a hair (literally) over 3 (!) grams, and also manages to carry an onboard camera that can transmit streaming video. The DelFly Nano (1.5 grams) still seems to be a work in progress, and as for the DelFly Pico, somebody at TU Delft sneezed nearby and now they can’t find it.

Yeah, I was kidding about that last one.

[ TU Delft ]
[ IMAV 2010 ]

Vecna Robotics’ BEAR Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot has been getting a workout at the Maneuver Battle Lab at Ft. Benning, courtesy of the US Army. What sets BEAR apart from other battlefield robots (like the Talon or Warrior) is its lift capacity of 500 pounds on two arms, which is a lot, like, seriously, a lot. PR2, for example, lifts about 4 pounds with each arm, which is a fairly typical payload for a domestic assistance robot. 500 pounds of payload means that BEAR can lift me three and a half times over, and look cute while doing so.

Speaking of, it turns out that those cute lil’ ears aren’t just for show: BEAR is cute to help calm down casualties, making the whole “you’re horribly injured but it’s okay because I’m a robot and I’m here to help” experience a bit more “pleasant.”

[ Vecna Robotics ]

Thanks Andy!

Billy McCafferty wrote in to let us know about a new blogging community called SharpRobotica that focuses on robotics software (get it?), as opposed to robotic hardware, which is what we here at BotJunkie tend to write about. In their words, “this blog aims to fill a much needed void of providing adept guidance on the software side of robotics with an emphasis of portability of ideas amongst hardware platforms.” It’s pretty hardcore stuff, with articles like Architectural Paradigms of Robotic Control, Message-Based Systems for Maintainable, Asynchronous Development, and a four part series on Developing Well-Designed Packages for ROS. Since it’s a blogging community, you can contribute articles on subjects that you know a lot about. Or, you can just do what I do, which is read stuff written by people way smarter than you in the hope of learning something. Either way, check it out.

[ SharpRobotica ]

We’ve posted a lot around here about how swarm robotics is potentially really, really awesome, but besides kidnapping children we haven’t seen that many relevant examples of practical swarm robotics. The above video, from the GRASP Lab at UPenn, shows a group of autonomous quadrotors (these bad boys) teaming up to lift heavy and off-balance loads.

Each quadrotor weighs 500 grams and can deliver some 1250 grams of thrust, making their individual payload capacity somewhere around half a kilogram. This means that a couple together could lift a kilogram, and you can do the math on from there, but there are lots of reasons why you might want a bunch of extra robots cooperating on the lift, which gets back to why swarm robotics has so much potential in the first place. For example, having extra bots protects against mechanical failure of an individual bot. It also protects against complications like wind. Or maybe whatever you’re lifting has a long distance to go or needs to be in the air for a while, and the bots can switch off to go recharge themselves.

It’s interesting to compare these cooperative quadrotors with that distributed flight array from ETH Zurich that we wrote about last month. It’s a different approach, certainly, but the premise is similar, and it’ll be lots of fun to see how each of these projects evolves.

[ GRASP ]

I keep on wondering why robotics researchers persist in designing humanoid robots specifically for domestic applications… Quite often, it seems to because they figure if the robot looks like a person, then it’ll be easier for people to relate to it and become comfortable having it in their home.

Such figuring isn’t quite right, and in fact may be entirely wrong, at least according to this 2008 study from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and EPFL. Researchers surveyed 240 people at a home and living exhibition in Geneva about their feelings on robots in their lives, and came up with some interesting data, including the above graph which shows pretty explicitly that having domestic robots that look like humans (or even “creatures”) is not a good idea, and is liable to make people uncomfortable.

The location for the survey was chosen because the people attending the exhibition weren’t interested in robots specifically, but rather home technology in general, making them potential early adopters for robots in the home. And since they decided that going to a home and living exhibition was a fun way to spend their time, it’s probably safe to assume that they’d spent some time thinking about what they would and wouldn’t like to get out of a robot. After the jump, more data on what respondents see robots doing for them in the near future.

(Read more…)

Oh, this is a safety video and not a how to? Oh.

PR2 is a lot like a little kid… Tons of potential, but best not to leave unsupervised. Except, I guess, that PR2 is the size of a small refrigerator and (according to the safety video) can quite easily squish you, stab you with knives, and set your house on fire. Also, it comes with a wireless kill switch, and I’m pretty sure that little kids don’t have one of those.

[ Willow Garage ] VIA [ I Heart Robotics ]

Batteries are terribly inconvenient. The more power or endurance you need, the bulkier and heavier the battery has to be, and the more time it takes to recharge. Really, it’s the recharging that’s the problem, since until we develop a feasible ultracapacitor, any battery powered robot is going to have to spend a significant amount of time doing nothing but sitting around recharging its batteries.

One way to get around this is to charge backup batteries external to the robot itself, but that process has generally been more trouble than it’s worth, since batteries tend to be heavily integrated into the structures of robots. Way back in September of 2009, we posted about a conceptual pet care robot that used an external battery swapping method, which was very cool, but it didn’t look like it had a prayer of ever being realized. The video above shows an actual external battery swapping system in action, on a marXbot, which is part of the Swarmanoid project from EPFL. Using a rotary loader, marXbot can swap out its battery in seconds while a capacitor keeps the robot powered. The batteries charge on the loader, so by the time the spent battery makes it all the way around, it’s been recharged and is ready for another robot in need of a fresh meal.

Somewhat ironically, swarms of robots are arguably least dependent on power system restraints, the idea being that you can just have other robots in the swarm cycle in and out to charge. However, the more robots you have, the more charging infrastructure you need. With this battery swapping system, the number of robots that can recharge at once is limited only by the number of batteries in the system, as opposed to the number of charging stations or outlets or something, which is much more efficient.

[ marXbot ]

These robots don’t have much on the Spain-Germany game yesterday, but that’s okay… RoboCup still has 40 years to achieve their goal of creating a humanoid robot that can defeat a world class homo sapiens soccer team.

Team NimbRo from the University of Bonn won the TeenSize tournament at RoboCup 2010, and also took home the Louis Vuitton (?) Best Humanoid Award. Grats!

[ Team NimbRo ]

I was going to just do three posts today about beer fetching robots, but then I saw that NASA’s Project M website was updated with a heartfelt statement of the project’s driving philosophy from Matt Ondler, the manager of Project M. I read it, and decided to stay up late writing this article.

We’ve been following Project M fairly closely… In 1000 days, a small team envisioned putting a humanoid robot on the moon. From the beginning, however, Project M was never a sure thing as far as NASA was concerned, and it never received agency level approval or substantial dedicated funding. Despite this fact (or, perhaps, because of it), the Project M team was able to accomplish a great deal in a small amount of time with limited resources by cooperating with other groups while eschewing bureaucracy. As Matt says:

A thousand days drives our creativity, it fires our intolerance for obstacles and unnecessary process, and if accomplished it changes the conversation about what is possible.

It seems as though the future of Project M may be more in doubt than it appears to those of us who just admire the results, despite the obvious dedication and successes of the team. Here are a few more excerpts from Matt’s message, which speaks to the overall vision (and possible future) of the project:

We are a technological society falling behind in graduating engineers and scientists. We felt it was our responsibility to create a mission worthy of capturing the minds and imagination of the youth of the country. I have had the privilege of taking scores of visitors to see R2. The machine never fails to awe the most cynical, to put a smile on the most jaded, and to instill wonder in everyone that interacts with it. A humanoid robot walking on the moon will inspire students and demonstrate our technological prowess. We also thought quite frankly, President Obama might agree that it is a compelling and worthy mission for NASA to conduct.

We have nearly reached the end of our cobbled together funding and charge code allocations and I often get asked is the project still alive. I get asked by the team are we really going to do this, especially when nothing about the future seems clear. I know the technologies we are developing are valuable to NASA, I know the mission is compelling to the country. I know this kind of project is the right thing to do. But my honest answer is I don’t know. I don’t know if we will get the resources we need. I don’t know if we’ll be given the chance. But we will make the most of what we do have. We will continue to trade and barter and scrap for resources. We’ll argue for charge codes. We’ll find capacity wherever it might be. We won’t sit on our hands and lament the state of the Agency and wait for some revelation to appear. We will continue to push back the darkness until they chain the doors and take away our hacksaws. I think that is what the American people expect of all of us.

I would comment on some of the issues that Matt brings up here, but I don’t want to distract from his message. I will say, however, that this has entirely cemented my faith in the Project M team. This is the type of culture and progress NASA should be embracing: small groups of creative and dedicated people doing amazing things. Project M deserves NASA’s support, and ours.

I would very much encourage you to read the entire message at the link below.

[ Project M ]

Baxter may not have arms, and he may look just like a trashcan, but that’s not going to stop him bringing you a beer. At least, as long as he has help from his trusty sidekick, RoboFridge. Baxter and RoboFridge together form the BDS, or Beer Delivery System. As long as no stairs are involved, Baxter will use an impressive variety of navigation techniques (including wheel encoders, line following, and homing beacons) to make his way from wherever you are to RoboFridge. Once there, RoboFridge opens, spits out a can into Baxter’s maw, and then closes again, and Baxter will retrace his non-steps back to you.

Apparently, Baxter is only the first phase of a system designed to solve the issue of beer being over there and me being over here. Also, there are many other things that are over there and I’m still over here, and Baxter can be adapted to carry all pretty much whatever you want. Say, chips, for example. Mmm, chips.

Since so far, none of these beer serving robots have spontaneously appeared next to my couch, I’m going to go take care of the problem myself. Cheers!

[ Norris Labs ] VIA [ CNet ]