Robotics  

Toyota has announced that it has hired Gill Pratt to head its autonomous car and robotics research. Pratt is known for spearheading the DARPA Robotics Challenge. The company is also investing $50 million in artificial intelligence and robotics research over the next five years in partnership with MIT and Stanford.

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Toyota has announced the first step of what is expected to be a major push into artificial intelligence and robotics, technologies that the company sees as critical for addressing current and future societal challenges.

The world’s largest automaker by sales, says it will establish two collaborative research centers at MIT and Stanford University, with an investment of $50 million over the next five years. The initial focus will be on accelerating the development of AI with applications to smarter and safer vehicles, as well as robots that can make our lives better at home, especially as we age.

Toyota’s work on autonomous vehicles and advanced driving support systems has been developing for many years.  The company, like Honda, has initiated a lot of work on  robots for industrial use since the 1970s, and for Partner and Human Support Robot applications since the 2000s (see video below).

This collaborative effort will open up new avenues for systems and product development across a broader range of mobility applications.

"Our long-term goal is to make a car that is never responsible for a crash"

The initial strategy for Toyota is to work on 'assistive autonomy' for vehicles.  This is not self driving like Google and others are pursuing, but having the driver active most of the time, with the vehicle continuously sensing and interpreting the environment around, and ready to step in as soon as it detects a dangerous situation. Toyota believes this approach could make cars virtually crash-proof.

“Our long-term goal is to make a car that is never responsible for a crash,” says Dr. Gill Pratt, who was until just a few months ago the program manager at DARPA responsible for the DARPA Robotics Challenge and will now direct this research at Toyota. He added that such smart cars will “allow older people to be able to drive, and help prevent the one and a half million deaths that occur as a result of cars every single year around the world.”

Pratt will be working with Professor Daniela Rus, head of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), as well as Professor Fei-Fei Li, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).

Pratt will be overseeing the overall collaborative effort at the research centers, to “direct and accelerate these research activities and [their] application to intelligent vehicles and robotics.”

Toyota isn’t yet ready to comment on what its entire robotics effort will consist of, but we’ve been assured that this is just the first move, according to IEEE Spectrum, "We’re expecting big things."

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 Robotics  

DARPA has just announced that 14 new teams from seven different countries have qualified to participate in the Robotics Challenge Finals. The 14 teams will join the 11 teams that previously qualified during the DRC Trials.

The international robotics community has turned out in force for the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals, a competition of robots and their human supervisors to be held June 5-6, 2015, at Fairplex in Pomona, California, outside of Los Angeles. In the competition, human-robot teams will be tested on capabilities that could enable them to provide assistance in future natural and man-made disasters.

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Fourteen new teams from Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, South Korea, and the United States qualified to join 11 previously announced teams. In total, 25 teams will now vie for a chance to win one of three cash prizes totaling $3.5 million at the DRC Finals.

“We’re excited to see so much international interest in the ,” said Gill Pratt, program manager for the DRC. “The diverse participation indicates not only a general interest in robotics, but also the priority many governments are placing on furthering robotic technology. As this technology becomes increasingly global, cooperating with the United States in areas where there is mutual concern, such as disaster response and homeland security, stands to benefit every country involved.

"The diverse participation indicates not only a general interest in robotics, but also the priority many governments are placing on furthering robotic technology."

“We’re looking forward to seeing how the teams ensure the robustness of their robots against falls, strategically manage battery power, and build enough partial autonomy into the robots to complete the challenge tasks despite DARPA deliberately degrading the communication links between robots and operators,” said Pratt.

To qualify for the DRC Finals, the new teams had to submit videos showing successful completion of five sample tasks: engage an emergency shut-off  switch, get up from a prone position, locomote ten meters without falling, pass over a barrier, and rotate a circular valve 360 degrees.

The 14 newly qualified teams are listed below by location and organizational affiliation.

Germany 

• Team Hector (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt)
• Team NimbRo Rescue (University of Bonn, Bonn)

am NimbRo Rescue

Hong Kong 

• Team HKU (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

Italy 

• Team WALK-MAN (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa; University of Pisa, Pisa)

Team WALK-MAN

Japan 

• Team Aero (University of Tokyo, Tokyo)
• Team AIST-NEDO (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tokyo)
• Team HRP2-Tokyo (University of Tokyo, Tokyo)
• Team NEDO-JSK (University of Tokyo, Tokyo; Chiba Institute of Technology, Chiba; Osaka University, Osaka; Kobe University, Kobe)
• Team NEDO-Hydra (University of Tokyo, Tokyo)

Team HRP2-Tokyo

People’s Republic of China 

• Team Intelligent Pioneer (Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changzhou)

Team Intelligent Pioneer 

South Korea

• Team ROBOTIS (ROBOTIS, Seoul)
• Team SNU (Seoul National University, Seoul)

Team ROBOTIS

United States 

• Team DRC-Hubo @ UNLV (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
• Team Grit (Grit Robotics, Grand Junction, Colo.; Colorado Mesa University, Grand Junction, Colo.; AutonomouStuff, LLC, Morton, Ill.; Harbrick, Moscow, Idaho)

Team DRC-Hubo

These 14 teams join the 11 teams that participated in the December 2013 DRC Trials and earned enough points to automatically qualify to participate in the Finals:

• Tartan Rescue (Carnegie Mellon University, National Robotics Engineering Center, Pittsburgh)
• Team IHMC Robotics (Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, Pensacola, Fla.)
• Team KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea)
• Team MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.)
• Team RoboSimian (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.)
• Team THOR (University of California, Los Angeles; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia)
• Team TRACLabs (TRACLabs, Inc., Webster, Texas)
• Team Trooper (Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, Cherry Hill, N.J., Rensselaer Polytechnic University, Troy, N.Y.; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia)
• Team Valor (Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va.)
• Team ViGIR (TORC Robotics, Blacksburg, Va.; Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany; Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va.; Oregon State University, Corvallis, Ore.)
• Team WPI-CMU (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass.)

“There will be roughly 15 different commercial and custom physical robot forms demonstrated at the DRC Finals,” said Pratt. “Although seven teams will use the upgraded ATLAS robot from Boston Dynamics, it’s each team’s unique software, user interface, and strategy that will distinguish them and push the technology forward.”

The DRC Finals event is free and open to the public and media. In addition to the competition, an on-site robotics exposition (DRC Expo) will showcase technology related to disaster response, robotics, and unmanned aerial systems.

More information about the DRC Finals, the teams, and the DRC Expo can be found at www.theroboticschallenge.org.


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 Robotics  

New videos of the Valkyrie and ATLAS robots preparing for the DARPA Robotics Challenge make the long visions of science fiction seem tangibly close to reality.

DARPAs Robotics Challenge last year required a lot of patience to watch. Most of the robots moved at a snail's pace through the obstacles, and left many wondering how the devices were ever going to be able to help in a disaster zone.

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In an exponential technology though, a little amount of time can produce a big change.  NASA's Valkyrie didn't make much of an impact at the December 2013 DRC trials, but it was a very late entry.  Based on the impressive video above, the development team has been putting in a lot of work to improve the mobility and control systems of the robot.

We are pretty used to seeing YouTube videos of robots with an indicator that the video has been sped up 4X or 10X to make it seem more impressive (and bearable to watch), but the Valkyrie video and the one below showing Boston Dynamics' ATLAS are playing in real-time.

Although not likely by this summer's finals, it does not seem to far out of the question that these robots will be moving at near human speeds during their tests very soon.  Also impressive is the balancing.  In both videos, the robots are tethered for safety, but he straps are visibly dangling loose.

ATLAS in the configuration shown here is still using the noisy hydraulics, not the new electric system, but if you just look at the lower portion of the robot, the legs do operate in a very human-like manner.

Valkyrie places each foot down very deliberately, with a definite thud, but then does some very impressive acrobatic balancing. The transitions between the moves are very fluid, and we have to appreciate how quiet the robot is too.

For those of us who have been following the development of these projects and others like the US Navy's SAFFiR, the progress has been noticeable and has us placed on a very realistic probability chart of very soon having science fiction-type robots as part of our lives.




SOURCE  IEEE Spectrum

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 DARPA Robotics Challenge  

DARPA has revealed upgrades to the ATLAS robot. The robot was redesigned for DARPA by Boston Dynamics, with the goal of improving power efficiency to better support untethered battery operation. The upgraded robot will be used by up to seven teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

When we were first introduced to ATLAS, the humanoid robot developed for the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), it was obvious that a next generation would be needed to untether the bot, and reduce the noise of the hydraulic pumps it used so that people could use the robot more freely. As a platform for intervention in disaster situations, like the earthquake in Fukishima, the robot needed to be more agile and testable in real-world scenarios.

Those changes are now mainly done, as is a total of 75% of ATLAS Unplugged, the latest version of the Boston Dynamics-built robot. Really only the lower legs and feet remain from the original design.

"Basically we have cut the cord.  We have to no longer rely on a safety line on the top."

"ATLAS Unplugged is the upgrade to ATLAS to allow it to run entirely on batteries, and to have it use a wireless communication path and for it not require a safety tether to hold itself up," said Gill Pratt, DRC Program Manager. "Basically we have cut the cord.  We have to no longer rely on a safety line on the top."

According to DARPA, the most significant changes are to the robot’s power supply and pump. ATLAS will now pack an onboard 3.7-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack, with the potential for one hour of “mixed mission” operation that includes walking, standing, use of tools, and other movements. This will drive a new quiet variable-pressure pump that allows for more efficient operation.

“The introduction of a battery and variable-pressure pump into Atlas poses a strategic challenge for teams,” said Pratt,  DRC Program Manager in a press release. “The operator will be able to run the robot on a mid-pressure setting for most operations to save power, and then apply bursts of maximum pressure when additional force is needed. The teams are going to have to game out the right balance of force and battery life to complete the course.”

The robot is also now constructed out of lighter materials.  The inclusion of a battery and a new pump system adds only a modest increase in overall weight with the upgraded robot standing 6-foot-2 (1.88 meters) and weighs 345 pounds (156.5 kg). No word yet if the new battery system will make its way into Boston Dynamics other robots.

Re-sized actuators in the hip, knee, and back now give ALTAS greater leg strength.

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The re-positioned shoulders and arms will allow for increased work space in front of the robot and let the robot's own cameras view the hands in motion, thus providing additional sensor feedback to the operator.

Soon new electrically actuated lower arms will increase strength and dexterity and improve force sensing.  As the video above describes, this will allow ATLAS to turn a doorknob at the wrist rather than using the shoulder actuator.

Three onboard perception computers will be used for perception and task planning, and a wireless router in the head enables untethered communication. In the event of a failure, a wireless emergency stop allows for safe operation.

Teams should have their new robots to play with by the end of January.

SOURCE  IEEE Spectrum

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 Robotics  

Developing energy efficient legged robots will dramatically affect the adoption of humanoid robots in the future. At the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals next summer, a research team from Sandia Labs intends to show a working prototype of a vastly improved walking robot.

Through a DARPA-supported project, Sandia Labs is developing technology that will dramatically improve the endurance of legged robots, helping them operate for long periods while performing the types of locomotion most relevant to disaster response scenarios.

A robot that showcases this technology will be demonstrated at an exposition to be held in conjunction with the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals next June.

As the finals draw closer, some of the most advanced robotics research and development organizations in the world are racing to develop emergency response robots that can complete a battery of tasks specified by DARPA. Competing robots will face degraded physical environments that simulate conditions likely to occur in a natural or man-made disaster. Many robots will walk on legs to allow them to negotiate challenging terrain.

Sandia’s robots won’t compete in the finals next June, but they could ultimately help the winning robots extend their battery life until their life-saving work is done.

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“We’ll demonstrate how energy efficient biped walking robots could become. Increased efficiency could allow robots similar to those used for the competition to operate for much longer periods of time without recharging batteries,” said project lead Steve Buerger of Sandia’s Intelligent Systems Control Department.

Battery life is an important concern in the usefulness of robots for emergency response.

“You can have the biggest, baddest, toughest robot on the planet, but if its battery life is 10 or 20 minutes, as many are right now, that robot cannot possibly function in an emergency situation, when lives are at stake,” said Buerger.

The first robot Sandia is developing in support of the DARPA Challenge, is known as STEPPR for Sandia Transmission Efficient Prototype Promoting Research. It is a fully functional research platform that allows developers to try different joint-level mechanisms that function like elbows and knees to quantify how much energy is used.

Sandia’s second robot, WANDERER for Walking Anthropomorphic Novelly Driven Efficient Robot for Emergency Response, will be a more optimized and better-packaged prototype.

The key to the testing is Sandia’s novel, energy-efficient actuators, which move the robots’ joints. The actuation system uses efficient, brushless DC motors with very high torque-to-weight ratios, very efficient low-ratio transmissions and specially designed passive mechanisms customized for each joint to ensure energy efficiency.

"We take advantage of dynamic characteristics that are common to a wide variety of legged behaviors and add a set of ‘support elements,’ including springs and variable transmissions, that keep the motors operating at more efficient speed-torque conditions, reducing losses."

“We take advantage of dynamic characteristics that are common to a wide variety of legged behaviors and add a set of ‘support elements,’ including springs and variable transmissions, that keep the motors operating at more efficient speed-torque conditions, reducing losses,” Buerger said.

Electric motors are particularly inefficient when providing large torques at low speeds, for example, to a crouching robot, Buerger said. A simple support element, such as a spring, would provide torque, reducing the load on the motor.

“The support elements also allow robots to self-adjust when they change behaviors. When they change from level walking to uphill walking, for example, they can make subtle adjustments to their joint dynamics to optimize efficiency under the new condition,” Buerger said.

The robots must adapt to the diverse kinds of conditions expected in emergency response scenarios.

“Certain legged robot designs are extremely efficient when walking on level ground, but function extremely inefficiently under other conditions or cannot walk over different types of terrains. Robots need an actuation system to enable efficient locomotion in many different conditions,” Buerger said. “That is what the adjustable support elements can do.”

Early testing has shown STEPPR to operate efficiently and quietly.

“Noise is lost energy, so being quiet goes hand-in-hand with being efficient. Most robots make a lot of noise, and that can be a major drawback for some applications,” Buerger said.

STEPPR’s and WANDERER’s electronics and low-level software are being developed by the Open Source Robotics Foundation. The designs will be publicly released, allowing engineers and designers all over the world to take advantage of advances.

The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition is developing energy-efficient walking control algorithms for both robots. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Globe Motors also are contributing to the project.

Sandia’s robotic work will be demonstrated in the technology exposition section of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, scheduled for June 5-6 at Fairplex in Pomona, California.



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 Robotics  

ATLAS, the humanoid robot built for the DARPA Robotics Challenge is cutting the cord.  In new demo videos, the robot is seen walking unattached and carrying heavy loads across a warehouse floor.

Since the initial stages of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), the Boston Dynamics-built ATLAS robot has been progressing well as the various teams continue to develop it. Where we used to see ATLAS secured to gantries and cranes to save it from unwanted falls, the humanoid robot is now roaming unteatherd (apart from hydraulic and power lines).

The demo above, which was presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Hong Kong, shows ATLAS dragging a huge piece of metal around an open space. The project is part of DRC work and was produced by Scott Kuindersma, Frank Permenter, and Russ Tedrake.

The video is significant as it shows that ATLAS can now walk while off-balance. This means the robot could carry various objects. It is beginning to look like a humanoid robot that can do actual work.

In a second video (below), a stereo depth fusion visualization of what ATLAS "sees" is shown.

Related articles Dennis Hong On Robot Evolution and The DARPA Robotics Challenge  Robot Revolution - Will Machines Surpass Humans?  Meet DARPA's ATLAS Humanoid Robot

This video demonstrates the simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) systems used by the robot. The use of stereo depth fusion using Kintinuous (originally used to build large maps with Kinect data) to a quality which matches LIDAR data. The heightmap shown was used to place the required footsteps a priori while stationary. It also demonstrates the state estimation is provided by a highly tuned estimator developed by MIT. In this case it is running open loop (and not using any laser info). In open loop mode it drifts about 4cm in this total walking motion.




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 DRC  

Less than a year from now teams from around the world will compete in the finals of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.  The final stage of the competition will take place in Ponoma, California.

The date has been set.  From June 5-6, 2015, California will be the stage for the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals. Teams from around the world will meet at Fairplex in Pomona to compete for the $2 million prize to be awarded to the team that best demonstrates human-supervised robot technology for disaster response.

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The DRC is a competition of human-robot systems developed to help emergency personnel respond to natural and man-made disasters. Participating teams from some of the most advanced robotics research and development organizations in the world are designing hardware, software, sensors, and human-machine control interfaces to be tested in a series of tasks selected by DARPA for their broad relevance to disaster response operations.

“Six months ago at the DRC Trials, we began physically testing human-supervised robots against disaster-relevant tasks. Their impressive performance gave us the confidence to raise the bar,” said Dr. Gill Pratt, DRC program manager. “A year from now at the DRC Finals we will push the technology even further.”

While the tasks at the DRC Finals will be similar to the Trials, a number of new elements will challenge the team’s systems:

• Robots will not be connected to power cords, fall arrestors, or wired communications tethers;
• Humans will not be allowed to physically intervene if a robot falls or get stuck—robots that fall will have to do so without breaking and will have to get up without assistance;
• Speed will be more heavily weighted in the scoring, and all tasks must be completed in a total time of approximately one hour (versus four hours in the DRC Trials);
• Communications will be further degraded and intermittent.

It will be very interesting to see the ATLAS Robot walking and competing untethered for the first time.

Completing the tasks in the time allotted will require innovations on several fronts, including in the human-robot interfaces teams use to control their robots.

“For the first time, teams will be empowered to exploit cloud and crowd-augmented robotics, two highly promising research areas that allow onsite operators to leverage remote data, computing, and human resources,” said Pratt. “These research areas are in their infancy, but after the DRC Finals we hope to see significant innovation.”

"These research areas are in their infancy, but after the DRC Finals we hope to see significant innovation."

A number of teams were declared finalists at the DRC Trials based on points scored during the December 2013 event, qualifying them for automatic entry into the DRC Finals and, for some, DARPA funding. The first-place finisher, SCHAFT, has elected to withdraw from the Finals to focus on the development of its first commercial product. Another finalist, Team THOR, has since split into two teams; one, Team Valor, remains at Virginia Tech and the other, Team THOR, is now based at the University of California, Los Angeles. All of the finalists except Team KAIST are presently receiving DARPA funding.

The 11 finalists are:

1. IHMC Robotics (Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, Pensacola, Florida)
2. Tartan Rescue (Carnegie Mellon University, National Robotics Engineering Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
3. Team MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts)
4. RoboSimian (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California)
5. Team TRACLabs (TRACLabs, Inc., Webster, Texas)
6. Team WPI-CMU (formerly Team WRECS, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts)
7. Team Trooper (Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, Cherry Hill, New Jersey) 
8. Team ViGIR (TORC Robotics, Blacksburg, Virginia; TU Darmstadt, Germany; Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia; Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR)
9. Team THOR (University of California, Los Angeles, California)
10. Team Valor (Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia)
11. Team KAIST (Daejeon Metro City, Republic of Korea)

DARPA expects many more teams to join the DRC Finals competition, including new teams sponsored by the European Union and the governments of Japan and Korea.


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 DARPA Robotics Challege  

The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials are now on and live streaming.

It is on!  The DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials are underway. There are camera crews who will be live streaming almost every event.

Related articles Dennis Hong On Robot Evolution and The DARPA Robotics Challenge  The What, Why, How, Who and When of the DARPA Robotics Challenge  Meet DARPA's ATLAS Humanoid Robot

When DARPA talks about "Red" teams and "Blue" teams, they're differentiating between teams that brought their own robots for Track A and D ("Red") and teams using ATLAS for Track B and C ("Blue"). To simplify logistics, there are separate competition areas for Red and Blue, so there are several competitions going on at once.



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 DARPA Robotics Challenge  

With the DARPA Robotics Challenge trials just days away, NASA has introduced the world to its entry, called Valkyrie.  The impressive looking humanoid robot is based on the space agency's Robonaut work, and looks to be ready for competition.

L ooking very much like a proper robot, NASA has unveiled its entry for the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), and it is named Valkyrie. Aesthetically Valkyrie is a cross between a Japanese Gundham, Ironman and a little bit of ATLAS thrown in.

Unmistakably a cousin to Robonaut 2, who works in the International Space Station, Valkyrie will be competing in less than two weeks alongside the other robot competitors at the DRC.

Officially Valkyrie is known as 'R5' at NASA.  Presumably R's 3-4 were shelved in the development process(?)

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NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC), which only previously released concept art for their entry in the competition has since the contest announcement been quite secretive about their robot.

IEEE Spectrum got the first look at the robot recently and shared the details.  Valkyrie is 1.9 meters tall, 125 kilograms, and has 44 degrees of freedom.  The battery-powered humanoid robot was built by NASA's Johnson Space Center team in Houston, in partnership with the University of Texas and Texas A&M.

Valkyrie is equipped with a large amount of sensors: cameras and LIDAR in the head, more cameras and sonar in the abdomen, and even more cameras in the forearms, knees, and feet. All of these data won't be transmitted back to Valkyrie's operators all at once, but being able to take advantage of whatever sensor is most relevant to the robot's current task should help Valkyrie be fast and efficient, whether it's being teleoperated or functioning more autonomously.

Certainly compared to most of the other DRC competitors, Valkyrie appears to be ready to safetly work alongside peple.  It is covered in foam and tailored upholstery, including stylish details.  "Our robot is soft," NASA JSC team leader Nicolaus Radford told IEEE Summit. "If you brush against it while you're working, you don't want to feel this cold, hard metal. You want it to feel natural, like you're working next to another human being. The soft goods, the clothes we put on the robot, give it that feel, that appearance of being more comfortable to be near."

The future plans for Valkyrie extend beyond the DRC.  Radford explains: "in the same way that Valkyrie has benefited from the 15 years of robotics development in the Robonaut program and NASA's exoskeleton, we'll continue the development cycle, with technologies that we've developed for Valkyrie feeding back into Robonaut, making our space-faring robots even better than they are now."


SOURCE  IEEE Spectrum

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Florida’s Homestead-Miami Speedway is gearing up for the competitors for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, where visions of a $2 million prize and international prestige dance in the heads of the machines’ creators.

Christmas may be big on everyone's radar right now, but for robotics enthusiasts, this December 20th and 21st will be huge. On those days research teams from around the world will be competing in the trials of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC)—a mock-up of a disaster scenario prompted by Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown.  The disaster, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami dramatically pointed to the need for advanced humanoid robotics.

Teams will be programming their emergency-response robots to perform eight basic tasks that were modeled from the Fukushima Daiichi response and then converted into standardized tests by researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

A year later, the capabilities of robots that qualify in this year’s trials will be tested in a more realistic disaster scenario. In the winner-take-all finals, robots will perform all eight challenges consecutively.

The goal of the novel competition, according to DARPA, is to spur “cost-effective” hardware and software innovations that will enable future robots to perform the most hazardous activities during or in the aftermath of a disaster.

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NIST has been tapped for assistance to help draft the disaster-response requirements for robots and distill them into tests that the Defense Department agency can use to measure and compare the capabilities of competitors.

“The DARPA Robotics Challenge is a great learning opportunity for the robotics community and a chance for NIST to demonstrate how standard performance tests help to inspire and guide innovation while measuring progress in a diverse, fast-moving area of technology,” says engineer Adam Jacoff, leader of the NIST testing program.

So far, more than 100 response robots, both experimental and commercial, have run the gauntlet of NIST test methods at Response Robot Evaluation Exercises and in support of robot procurements. Over the last few years, the suite of performance tests has been duplicated at sites around the United States and in Germany, Japan, and soon, Australia.

In the first two tasks during the December, 2013, trials at the Homestead Speedway in Florida, robot contestants will drive a utility vehicle through a slalom course, dismount, and traverse increasingly complex obstacles. Other tasks include removing debris from an entry, opening several doors, climbing a ladder, locating and closing valves, connecting a hose, and using tools to cut a hole through a wall. All tasks consist of three sub-tasks, with points awarded for each completed within a 30-minute time limit.

The event is open to the public and is expected to bring in large crowds.  The event schedule is available from DARPA.

So instead of wrapping Christmas presents, the competitors and event organizers will be packing up robots and equipment, and heading to Florida. 




SOURCE  NIST

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 DARPA Robotics Challenge  

The qualifying Track B teams from the DARPA Robotics Challenge have recently received their ATLAS humanoid robots.  The teams, who got to this stage of the competition by proving their strategies on simulated robots, now get to work on the real thing.

The 330 pound Boston Dynamics-made Atlas robots have been delivered to the DARPA Robotics Challenge Track B teams.

Atlas is intended to be a first-responder or rescue robot, working in environments too dangerous for humans.

While Atlas may have the robust body for the task the DARPA challenge participants are working hard to deliver it's brains.

The agency is currently sponsoring a $2 million competition, with seven institutions vying to program Atlas for a real-world test responding to a disaster, scheduled for later this year.

“We’re in the playoffs,” said Michael A. Gennert, director of the robotics engineering program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), one of the teams in the competition.

Also running a team is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “We’re in this to win it,” said Seth Teller, who leads an Atlas programming team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

The intra-state competitors underscore how Massachusetts has risen to prominence as a center for robotics research. In addition to Boston Dynamics, other firms from the state include Bedford-based iRobot Corp., maker of the popular Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. IRobot also designed a mechanical hand for Atlas.

DARPA and Boston Dynamics launched Atlas following the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power station in Japan. Plant managers used tracked robots from iRobot to remotely inspect areas too radioactive for humans. But these machines could not reach parts of the facility that were accessible on foot.

“Those robots couldn’t really do much more than look around,” said Teller.

Boston Dynamics cofounder Marc Raibert believes that for moving through rocky or rubble-strewn terrain, robots with legs are the best solution.

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“They can go places where cars and wheeled and tracked vehicles can’t go,” Raibert said.

“Many of the places where disasters might occur are places that are designed for people,” Raibert told the Boston Globe. “People can fit in there and maneuver through them.”

So too are the intentions with Atlas, using the same tools as human first responders. A humanoid robot could climb into a car and drive itself to the disaster scene. Once there, it could open doors, climb ladders, turn valves or throw switches, just like a person.

In an early phase of the competition, 26 teams from eight countries wrote software to control a computer simulation of Atlas.

A consortium of Florida universities took first place, but WPI was runner-up and MIT was third. The two Massachusetts schools and five other teams will each get a real Atlas robot and financial support from DARPA.

In December, they’ll go to Homestead, Florids, to compete against each other, and against at least six Track A teams building their own robots from scratch.

“We’re moving from a simulated world where everything is neat and clean to a real physical world, which is apt to be messier,” said Teller.

The top-scoring teams will qualify for the finals, to be held in December of 2014. By then, Boston Dynamics expects to be able to provide a generator module for each Atlas, which will eliminate the currently used tether and allow the robot to walk freely. And again, the machines, controlled only by radio commands and built-in software, will be given the same eight tests, with $2 million for the top performing team.

Despite the high stakes, the various schools have worked together, sharing ideas on solving tough problems. And the WPI and MIT teams seem determined to keep it classy.

“Those guys are great,” R.J. Linton, project director for WPI’s Atlas team, said of his Cambridge rivals.

MIT professor Russ Tedrake praised the Worcester team for beating his squad in the preliminary round. “I think they did an amazing job.”

For Linton, it’s not a matter of money or bragging rights.

“What this is about is pushing technology and advancing the state of the art so we can save people’s lives,” he said.



SOURCE  Boston Globe, IEEE Spectrum, Top Image - Essdras M Suarez/Boston Globe

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