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Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Cybathlon Challenges: 2 February 2024, ZURICHEurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS

Enjoy today’s videos!

Figure’s robot is watching videos of humans making coffee, and then making coffee on its own.

While this is certainly impressive, just be aware that it’s not at all clear from the video exactly how impressive it is.

[ Figure ]

It’s really the shoes that get me with Westwood’s THEMIS robot.

THEMIS can also deliver a package just as well as a human can, if not better!

And I appreciate the inclusion of all of these outtakes, too:

[ Westwood Robotics ]

Kepler Exploration Robot recently unveiled its latest innovation, the Kepler Forerunner series of general-purpose humanoid robots. This advanced humanoid stands at a height of 178cm (5’10”), weighs 85kg (187 lbs.), and boasts an intelligent and dexterous hand with 12 degrees of freedom. The entire body has up to 40 degrees of freedom, enabling functionalities such as navigating complex terrains, intelligent obstacle avoidance, flexible manipulation of hands, powerful lifting and carrying of heavy loads, hand-eye coordination, and intelligent interactive communication.

[ Kepler Exploration ]

Introducing the new Ballie, your true AI companion. With more advanced intelligence, Ballie can come right to you and project visuals on your walls. It can also help you interact with other connected devices or take care of hassles.

[ Samsung ]

There is a thing called Drone Soccer that got some exposure at CES this week, but apparently it’s been around for several years, and originated in South Korea. Inspired by Quiddich, targeted at STEM students.

[ Drone Soccer ]

Every so often, JPL dumps a bunch of raw footage onto YouTube. This time, there’s Perseverance’s view of Ingenuity taking off, a test of the EELS robot, and an unusual sample tube drop test.

[ JPL ]

Our first months delivering to Walmart customers have made one thing clear: Demand for drone delivery is real. On the heels of our Dallas-wide FAA approvals, today we announced that millions of new DFW-area customers will have access to drone delivery in 2024!

[ Wing ]

Dave Burke works with Biomechatronics researcher Michael Fernandez to test a prosthesis with neural control, by cutting a sheet of paper with scissors. This is the first time in 30 years that Dave has performed this task with his missing hand.

[ MIT ]

Meet DJI’s first delivery drone—FlyCart 30. Overcome traditional transport challenges and start a new era of dynamic aerial delivery with large payload capacity, long operation range, high reliability, and intelligent features.

[ DJI ]

The Waymo Driver autonomously operating both a passenger vehicle and class 8 truck safely in various freeway scenarios, including on-ramps and off-ramps, lane merges, and sharing the road with others.

[ Waymo ]

In this paper, we present DiffuseBot, a physics-augmented diffusion model that generates soft robot morphologies capable of excelling in a wide spectrum of tasks. DiffuseBot bridges the gap between virtually generated content and physical utility by (i) augmenting the diffusion process with a physical dynamical simulation which provides a certificate of performance, and ii) introducing a co-design procedure that jointly optimizes physical design and control by leveraging information about physical sensitivities from differentiable simulation.

[ Paper ]

Introduction: The modern worldwide trend toward sedentary behavior comes with significant health risks. An accompanying wave of health technologies has tried to encourage physical activity, but these approaches often yield limited use and retention. Due to their unique ability to serve as both a health-promoting technology and a social peer, we propose robots as a game-changing solution for encouraging physical activity.

Methods: This article analyzes the eight exergames we previously created for the Rethink Baxter Research Robot in terms of four key components that are grounded in the video-game literature: repetition, pattern matching, music, and social design. We use these four game facets to assess gameplay data from 40 adult users who each experienced the games in balanced random order.

Results: In agreement with prior research, our results show that relevant musical cultural references, recognizable social analogues, and gameplay clarity are good strategies for taking an otherwise highly repetitive physical activity and making it engaging and popular among users.

Discussion: Others who study socially assistive robots and rehabilitation robotics can benefit from this work by considering the presented design attributes to generate future hypotheses and by using our eight open-source games to pursue follow-up work on social-physical exercise with robots.

Human-robot cooperation (HRC) is becoming increasingly relevant with the surge in collaborative robots (cobots) for industrial applications. Examples of humans and robots cooperating actively on the same workpiece can be found in research labs around the world, but industrial applications are still mostly limited to robots and humans taking turns. In this paper, we use a cooperative lifting task (co-lift) as a case study to explore how well this task can be learned within a limited time, and how background factors of users may impact learning. The experimental study included 32 healthy adults from 20 to 54 years who performed a co-lift with a collaborative robot. The physical setup is designed as a gamified user training system as research has validated that gamification is an effective methodology for user training. Human motions and gestures were measured using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors and used to interact with the robot across three role distributions: human as the leader, robot as the leader, and shared leadership. We find that regardless of age, gender, job category, gaming background, and familiarity with robots, the learning curve of all users showed a satisfactory progression and that all users could achieve successful cooperation with the robot on the co-lift task after seven or fewer trials. The data indicates that some of the background factors of the users such as occupation, past gaming habits, etc., may affect learning outcomes, which will be explored further in future experiments. Overall, the results indicate that the potential of the adoption of HRC in the industry is promising for a diverse set of users after a relatively short training process.

Inflatable fabric beams (IFBs) integrating pleat folds can generate complex motion by modifying the pleat characteristics (e.g., dimensions, orientations). However, the capability of the IFB to return to the folded configuration relies upon the elasticity of the fabrics, requiring additional pressure inputs or complementary mechanisms. Using soft compliant elements (SCEs) assembled onto pleat folds is an appealing approach to improving the IFB elasticity and providing a range of spatial configurations when pressurized. This study introduces an actuator comprising an IFB with pleat folds and SCEs. By methodologically assembling the SCEs onto the pleat folds, we constrain the IFB unfolding to achieve out-of-plane motion at 5 kPa. Besides, the proposed actuator can generate angular displacement by regulating the input pressure (> 5 kPa). A matrix-based representation and model are proposed to analyze the actuator motion. We experimentally study the actuator’s angular displacement by modifying SCE shapes, fold dimensions, and assembly distances of SCEs. Moreover, we analyze the effects of incorporating two SCEs onto a pleat fold. Our results show that the actuator motion can be tuned by integrating SCEs with different stiffness and varying the pleat fold dimensions. In addition, we demonstrate that the integration of two SCEs onto the pleat fold permits the actuator to return to its folded configuration when depressurized. In order to demonstrate the versatility of the proposed actuator, we devise and conduct experiments showcasing the implementation of a planar serial manipulator and a soft gripper with two grasping modalities.

In the development of dialogue systems for android robots, the goal is to achieve human-like communication. However, subtle differences between android robots and humans are noticeable, leading even human-like android robots to be perceived differently. Understanding how humans accept android robots and optimizing their behavior is crucial. Generally, human customers have various expectations and anxieties when interacting with a robotic salesclerk instead of a human. Asymmetric communication arises when android robots treat customers like humans while customers treat robots as machines. Focusing on human-robot interaction in a tourist guide scenario, In this paper, we propose an asymmetric communication strategy that does not use estimation technology for preference information, but instead performs changing the agent’s character in order to pretend to tailor to the customer. In line with this, we prepared an experimental method to evaluate asymmetric communication strategies, using video clips to simulate dialogues. Participants completed questionnaires without prior knowledge of whether the salesclerk was human-like or robotic. The method allowed us to assess how participants treated the salesclerk and the effectiveness of the asymmetric communication strategy. Additionally, during our demonstration in a dialogue robot competition, 29 visitors had a positive impression of the android robot’s asymmetric communication strategy and reported a high level of satisfaction with the dialogue.

Introduction: In the current landscape marked by swift digital transformations and global disruptions, comprehending the intersection of digitalization and sustainable business practices is imperative. This study focuses on the food industries of China and Pakistan, aiming to explore the influence of digitalization on cleaner production.

Methods: Employing a cross-sectional design, data were gathered through online surveys involving a diverse group of employees. Special attention was given to the emergent phenomenon of technostress and its subsequent implications for individuals in the workplace.

Results: The findings of the study demonstrate a significant impact of digitalization on both resource mobilization and interaction quality within the surveyed food industries. Notably, technostress emerged as a mediating factor, shedding light on the psychological challenges associated with digital transitions. The study further reveals the moderating role of the COVID-19 pandemic, altering the dynamics among the variables under investigation.

Discussion: From a theoretical perspective, this research contributes to the cleaner production literature by bridging it with the human-centric nuances of technological adaptation. On a practical level, the study emphasizes the importance of aligning digital strategies with resource mobilization to achieve sustainable outcomes. For the food industry and potentially beyond, the research offers a roadmap for integrating digital tools into operations, ensuring efficiency, and promoting cleaner production.

A basic assumption in most approaches to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the static nature of the environment. In recent years, some research has been devoted to the field of SLAM in dynamic environments. However, most of the studies conducted in this field have implemented SLAM by removing and filtering the moving landmarks. Moreover, the use of several robots in large, complex, and dynamic environments can significantly improve performance on the localization and mapping task, which has attracted many researchers to this problem more recently. In multi-robot SLAM, the robots can cooperate in a decentralized manner without the need for a central processing center to obtain their positions and a more precise map of the environment. In this article, a new decentralized approach is presented for multi-robot SLAM problems in dynamic environments with unknown initial correspondence. The proposed method applies a modified Fast-SLAM method, which implements SLAM in a decentralized manner by considering moving landmarks in the environment. Due to the unknown initial correspondence of the robots, a geographical approach is embedded in the proposed algorithm to align and merge their maps. Data association is also embedded in the algorithm; this is performed using the measurement predictions in the SLAM process of each robot. Finally, simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.

Smart haptic gloves are a new technology emerging in Virtual Reality (VR) with a promise to enhance sensory feedback in VR. This paper presents one of the first attempts to explore its application to surgical training for neurosurgery trainees using VR-based surgery simulators. We develop and evaluate a surgical simulator for External Ventricular Drain Placement (EVD), a common procedure in the field of neurosurgery. Haptic gloves are used in combination with a VR environment to augment the experience of burr hole placement, and flexible catheter manipulation. The simulator was integrated into the training curriculum at the 2022 Canadian Neurosurgery Rookie Bootcamp. Thirty neurosurgery residents used the simulator where objective performance metrics and subjective experience scores were acquired. We provide the details of the simulator development, as well as the user study results and draw conclusions on the benefits added by the haptic gloves and future directions.

Introduction: Image-based heart rate estimation technology offers a contactless approach to healthcare monitoring that could improve the lives of millions of people. In order to comprehensively test or optimize image-based heart rate extraction methods, the dataset should contain a large number of factors such as body motion, lighting conditions, and physiological states. However, collecting high-quality datasets with complete parameters is a huge challenge.

Methods: In this paper, we introduce a bionic human model based on a three-dimensional (3D) representation of the human body. By integrating synthetic cardiac signal and body involuntary motion into the 3D model, five well-known traditional and four deep learning iPPG (imaging photoplethysmography) extraction methods are used to test the rendered videos.

Results: To compare with different situations in the real world, four common scenarios (stillness, expression/talking, light source changes, and physical activity) are created on each 3D human. The 3D human can be built with any appearance and different skin tones. A high degree of agreement is achieved between the signals extracted from videos with the synthetic human and videos with a real human-the performance advantages and disadvantages of the selected iPPG methods are consistent for both real and 3D humans.

Discussion: This technology has the capability to generate synthetic humans within various scenarios, utilizing precisely controlled parameters and disturbances. Furthermore, it holds considerable potential for testing and optimizing image-based vital signs methods in challenging situations where real people with reliable ground truth measurements are difficult to obtain, such as in drone rescue.



The generative AI revolution embodied in tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and many others is at its core based on a simple formula: Take a very large neural network, train it on a huge dataset scraped from the Web, and then use it to fulfill a broad range of user requests. Large language models (LLMs) can answer questions, write code, and spout poetry, while image-generating systems can create convincing cave paintings or contemporary art.

So why haven’t these amazing AI capabilities translated into the kinds of helpful and broadly useful robots we’ve seen in science fiction? Where are the robots that can clean off the table, fold your laundry, and make you breakfast?

Unfortunately, the highly successful generative AI formula—big models trained on lots of Internet-sourced data—doesn’t easily carry over into robotics, because the Internet is not full of robotic-interaction data in the same way that it’s full of text and images. Robots need robot data to learn from, and this data is typically created slowly and tediously by researchers in laboratory environments for very specific tasks. Despite tremendous progress on robot-learning algorithms, without abundant data we still can’t enable robots to perform real-world tasks (like making breakfast) outside the lab. The most impressive results typically only work in a single laboratory, on a single robot, and often involve only a handful of behaviors.

If the abilities of each robot are limited by the time and effort it takes to manually teach it to perform a new task, what if we were to pool together the experiences of many robots, so a new robot could learn from all of them at once? We decided to give it a try. In 2023, our labs at Google and the University of California, Berkeley came together with 32 other robotics laboratories in North America, Europe, and Asia to undertake the RT-X project, with the goal of assembling data, resources, and code to make general-purpose robots a reality.

Here is what we learned from the first phase of this effort.

How to create a generalist robot

Humans are far better at this kind of learning. Our brains can, with a little practice, handle what are essentially changes to our body plan, which happens when we pick up a tool, ride a bicycle, or get in a car. That is, our “embodiment” changes, but our brains adapt. RT-X is aiming for something similar in robots: to enable a single deep neural network to control many different types of robots, a capability called cross-embodiment. The question is whether a deep neural network trained on data from a sufficiently large number of different robots can learn to “drive” all of them—even robots with very different appearances, physical properties, and capabilities. If so, this approach could potentially unlock the power of large datasets for robotic learning.

The scale of this project is very large because it has to be. The RT-X dataset currently contains nearly a million robotic trials for 22 types of robots, including many of the most commonly used robotic arms on the market. The robots in this dataset perform a huge range of behaviors, including picking and placing objects, assembly, and specialized tasks like cable routing. In total, there are about 500 different skills and interactions with thousands of different objects. It’s the largest open-source dataset of real robotic actions in existence.

Surprisingly, we found that our multirobot data could be used with relatively simple machine-learning methods, provided that we follow the recipe of using large neural-network models with large datasets. Leveraging the same kinds of models used in current LLMs like ChatGPT, we were able to train robot-control algorithms that do not require any special features for cross-embodiment. Much like a person can drive a car or ride a bicycle using the same brain, a model trained on the RT-X dataset can simply recognize what kind of robot it’s controlling from what it sees in the robot’s own camera observations. If the robot’s camera sees a UR10 industrial arm, the model sends commands appropriate to a UR10. If the model instead sees a low-cost WidowX hobbyist arm, the model moves it accordingly.

To test the capabilities of our model, five of the laboratories involved in the RT-X collaboration each tested it in a head-to-head comparison against the best control system they had developed independently for their own robot. Each lab’s test involved the tasks it was using for its own research, which included things like picking up and moving objects, opening doors, and routing cables through clips. Remarkably, the single unified model provided improved performance over each laboratory’s own best method, succeeding at the tasks about 50 percent more often on average.

While this result might seem surprising, we found that the RT-X controller could leverage the diverse experiences of other robots to improve robustness in different settings. Even within the same laboratory, every time a robot attempts a task, it finds itself in a slightly different situation, and so drawing on the experiences of other robots in other situations helped the RT-X controller with natural variability and edge cases. Here are a few examples of the range of these tasks:




Building robots that can reason

Encouraged by our success with combining data from many robot types, we next sought to investigate how such data can be incorporated into a system with more in-depth reasoning capabilities. Complex semantic reasoning is hard to learn from robot data alone. While the robot data can provide a range of physical capabilities, more complex tasks like “Move apple between can and orange” also require understanding the semantic relationships between objects in an image, basic common sense, and other symbolic knowledge that is not directly related to the robot’s physical capabilities.

So we decided to add another massive source of data to the mix: Internet-scale image and text data. We used an existing large vision-language model that is already proficient at many tasks that require some understanding of the connection between natural language and images. The model is similar to the ones available to the public such as ChatGPT or Bard. These models are trained to output text in response to prompts containing images, allowing them to solve problems such as visual question-answering, captioning, and other open-ended visual understanding tasks. We discovered that such models can be adapted to robotic control simply by training them to also output robot actions in response to prompts framed as robotic commands (such as “Put the banana on the plate”). We applied this approach to the robotics data from the RT-X collaboration.

The RT-X model uses images or text descriptions of specific robot arms doing different tasks to output a series of discrete actions that will allow any robot arm to do those tasks. By collecting data from many robots doing many tasks from robotics labs around the world, we are building an open-source dataset that can be used to teach robots to be generally useful.Chris Philpot

To evaluate the combination of Internet-acquired smarts and multirobot data, we tested our RT-X model with Google’s mobile manipulator robot. We gave it our hardest generalization benchmark tests. The robot had to recognize objects and successfully manipulate them, and it also had to respond to complex text commands by making logical inferences that required integrating information from both text and images. The latter is one of the things that make humans such good generalists. Could we give our robots at least a hint of such capabilities?

Even without specific training, this Google research robot is able to follow the instruction “move apple between can and orange.” This capability is enabled by RT-X, a large robotic manipulation dataset and the first step towards a general robotic brain.

We conducted two sets of evaluations. As a baseline, we used a model that excluded all of the generalized multirobot RT-X data that didn’t involve Google’s robot. Google’s robot-specific dataset is in fact the largest part of the RT-X dataset, with over 100,000 demonstrations, so the question of whether all the other multirobot data would actually help in this case was very much open. Then we tried again with all that multirobot data included.

In one of the most difficult evaluation scenarios, the Google robot needed to accomplish a task that involved reasoning about spatial relations (“Move apple between can and orange”); in another task it had to solve rudimentary math problems (“Place an object on top of a paper with the solution to ‘2+3’”). These challenges were meant to test the crucial capabilities of reasoning and drawing conclusions.

In this case, the reasoning capabilities (such as the meaning of “between” and “on top of”) came from the Web-scale data included in the training of the vision-language model, while the ability to ground the reasoning outputs in robotic behaviors—commands that actually moved the robot arm in the right direction—came from training on cross-embodiment robot data from RT-X. Some examples of evaluations where we asked the robots to perform tasks not included in their training data are shown below.While these tasks are rudimentary for humans, they present a major challenge for general-purpose robots. Without robotic demonstration data that clearly illustrates concepts like “between,” “near,” and “on top of,” even a system trained on data from many different robots would not be able to figure out what these commands mean. By integrating Web-scale knowledge from the vision-language model, our complete system was able to solve such tasks, deriving the semantic concepts (in this case, spatial relations) from Internet-scale training, and the physical behaviors (picking up and moving objects) from multirobot RT-X data. To our surprise, we found that the inclusion of the multirobot data improved the Google robot’s ability to generalize to such tasks by a factor of three. This result suggests that not only was the multirobot RT-X data useful for acquiring a variety of physical skills, it could also help to better connect such skills to the semantic and symbolic knowledge in vision-language models. These connections give the robot a degree of common sense, which could one day enable robots to understand the meaning of complex and nuanced user commands like “Bring me my breakfast” while carrying out the actions to make it happen.

The next steps for RT-X

The RT-X project shows what is possible when the robot-learning community acts together. Because of this cross-institutional effort, we were able to put together a diverse robotic dataset and carry out comprehensive multirobot evaluations that wouldn’t be possible at any single institution. Since the robotics community can’t rely on scraping the Internet for training data, we need to create that data ourselves. We hope that more researchers will contribute their data to the RT-X database and join this collaborative effort. We also hope to provide tools, models, and infrastructure to support cross-embodiment research. We plan to go beyond sharing data across labs, and we hope that RT-X will grow into a collaborative effort to develop data standards, reusable models, and new techniques and algorithms.

Our early results hint at how large cross-embodiment robotics models could transform the field. Much as large language models have mastered a wide range of language-based tasks, in the future we might use the same foundation model as the basis for many real-world robotic tasks. Perhaps new robotic skills could be enabled by fine-tuning or even prompting a pretrained foundation model. In a similar way to how you can prompt ChatGPT to tell a story without first training it on that particular story, you could ask a robot to write “Happy Birthday” on a cake without having to tell it how to use a piping bag or what handwritten text looks like. Of course, much more research is needed for these models to take on that kind of general capability, as our experiments have focused on single arms with two-finger grippers doing simple manipulation tasks.

As more labs engage in cross-embodiment research, we hope to further push the frontier on what is possible with a single neural network that can control many robots. These advances might include adding diverse simulated data from generated environments, handling robots with different numbers of arms or fingers, using different sensor suites (such as depth cameras and tactile sensing), and even combining manipulation and locomotion behaviors. RT-X has opened the door for such work, but the most exciting technical developments are still ahead.

This is just the beginning. We hope that with this first step, we can together create the future of robotics: where general robotic brains can power any robot, benefiting from data shared by all robots around the world.



The generative AI revolution embodied in tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and many others is at its core based on a simple formula: Take a very large neural network, train it on a huge dataset scraped from the Web, and then use it to fulfill a broad range of user requests. Large language models (LLMs) can answer questions, write code, and spout poetry, while image-generating systems can create convincing cave paintings or contemporary art.

So why haven’t these amazing AI capabilities translated into the kinds of helpful and broadly useful robots we’ve seen in science fiction? Where are the robots that can clean off the table, fold your laundry, and make you breakfast?

Unfortunately, the highly successful generative AI formula—big models trained on lots of Internet-sourced data—doesn’t easily carry over into robotics, because the Internet is not full of robotic-interaction data in the same way that it’s full of text and images. Robots need robot data to learn from, and this data is typically created slowly and tediously by researchers in laboratory environments for very specific tasks. Despite tremendous progress on robot-learning algorithms, without abundant data we still can’t enable robots to perform real-world tasks (like making breakfast) outside the lab. The most impressive results typically only work in a single laboratory, on a single robot, and often involve only a handful of behaviors.

If the abilities of each robot are limited by the time and effort it takes to manually teach it to perform a new task, what if we were to pool together the experiences of many robots, so a new robot could learn from all of them at once? We decided to give it a try. In 2023, our labs at Google and the University of California, Berkeley came together with 32 other robotics laboratories in North America, Europe, and Asia to undertake the RT-X project, with the goal of assembling data, resources, and code to make general-purpose robots a reality.

Here is what we learned from the first phase of this effort.

How to create a generalist robot

Humans are far better at this kind of learning. Our brains can, with a little practice, handle what are essentially changes to our body plan, which happens when we pick up a tool, ride a bicycle, or get in a car. That is, our “embodiment” changes, but our brains adapt. RT-X is aiming for something similar in robots: to enable a single deep neural network to control many different types of robots, a capability called cross-embodiment. The question is whether a deep neural network trained on data from a sufficiently large number of different robots can learn to “drive” all of them—even robots with very different appearances, physical properties, and capabilities. If so, this approach could potentially unlock the power of large datasets for robotic learning.

The scale of this project is very large because it has to be. The RT-X dataset currently contains nearly a million robotic trials for 22 types of robots, including many of the most commonly used robotic arms on the market. The robots in this dataset perform a huge range of behaviors, including picking and placing objects, assembly, and specialized tasks like cable routing. In total, there are about 500 different skills and interactions with thousands of different objects. It’s the largest open-source dataset of real robotic actions in existence.

Surprisingly, we found that our multirobot data could be used with relatively simple machine-learning methods, provided that we follow the recipe of using large neural-network models with large datasets. Leveraging the same kinds of models used in current LLMs like ChatGPT, we were able to train robot-control algorithms that do not require any special features for cross-embodiment. Much like a person can drive a car or ride a bicycle using the same brain, a model trained on the RT-X dataset can simply recognize what kind of robot it’s controlling from what it sees in the robot’s own camera observations. If the robot’s camera sees a UR10 industrial arm, the model sends commands appropriate to a UR10. If the model instead sees a low-cost WidowX hobbyist arm, the model moves it accordingly.

To test the capabilities of our model, five of the laboratories involved in the RT-X collaboration each tested it in a head-to-head comparison against the best control system they had developed independently for their own robot. Each lab’s test involved the tasks it was using for its own research, which included things like picking up and moving objects, opening doors, and routing cables through clips. Remarkably, the single unified model provided improved performance over each laboratory’s own best method, succeeding at the tasks about 50 percent more often on average.

While this result might seem surprising, we found that the RT-X controller could leverage the diverse experiences of other robots to improve robustness in different settings. Even within the same laboratory, every time a robot attempts a task, it finds itself in a slightly different situation, and so drawing on the experiences of other robots in other situations helped the RT-X controller with natural variability and edge cases. Here are a few examples of the range of these tasks:




Building robots that can reason

Encouraged by our success with combining data from many robot types, we next sought to investigate how such data can be incorporated into a system with more in-depth reasoning capabilities. Complex semantic reasoning is hard to learn from robot data alone. While the robot data can provide a range of physical capabilities, more complex tasks like “Move apple between can and orange” also require understanding the semantic relationships between objects in an image, basic common sense, and other symbolic knowledge that is not directly related to the robot’s physical capabilities.

So we decided to add another massive source of data to the mix: Internet-scale image and text data. We used an existing large vision-language model that is already proficient at many tasks that require some understanding of the connection between natural language and images. The model is similar to the ones available to the public such as ChatGPT or Bard. These models are trained to output text in response to prompts containing images, allowing them to solve problems such as visual question-answering, captioning, and other open-ended visual understanding tasks. We discovered that such models can be adapted to robotic control simply by training them to also output robot actions in response to prompts framed as robotic commands (such as “Put the banana on the plate”). We applied this approach to the robotics data from the RT-X collaboration.

The RT-X model uses images or text descriptions of specific robot arms doing different tasks to output a series of discrete actions that will allow any robot arm to do those tasks. By collecting data from many robots doing many tasks from robotics labs around the world, we are building an open-source dataset that can be used to teach robots to be generally useful.Chris Philpot

To evaluate the combination of Internet-acquired smarts and multirobot data, we tested our RT-X model with Google’s mobile manipulator robot. We gave it our hardest generalization benchmark tests. The robot had to recognize objects and successfully manipulate them, and it also had to respond to complex text commands by making logical inferences that required integrating information from both text and images. The latter is one of the things that make humans such good generalists. Could we give our robots at least a hint of such capabilities?

Even without specific training, this Google research robot is able to follow the instruction “move apple between can and orange.” This capability is enabled by RT-X, a large robotic manipulation dataset and the first step towards a general robotic brain.

We conducted two sets of evaluations. As a baseline, we used a model that excluded all of the generalized multirobot RT-X data that didn’t involve Google’s robot. Google’s robot-specific dataset is in fact the largest part of the RT-X dataset, with over 100,000 demonstrations, so the question of whether all the other multirobot data would actually help in this case was very much open. Then we tried again with all that multirobot data included.

In one of the most difficult evaluation scenarios, the Google robot needed to accomplish a task that involved reasoning about spatial relations (“Move apple between can and orange”); in another task it had to solve rudimentary math problems (“Place an object on top of a paper with the solution to ‘2+3’”). These challenges were meant to test the crucial capabilities of reasoning and drawing conclusions.

In this case, the reasoning capabilities (such as the meaning of “between” and “on top of”) came from the Web-scale data included in the training of the vision-language model, while the ability to ground the reasoning outputs in robotic behaviors—commands that actually moved the robot arm in the right direction—came from training on cross-embodiment robot data from RT-X. Some examples of evaluations where we asked the robots to perform tasks not included in their training data are shown below.While these tasks are rudimentary for humans, they present a major challenge for general-purpose robots. Without robotic demonstration data that clearly illustrates concepts like “between,” “near,” and “on top of,” even a system trained on data from many different robots would not be able to figure out what these commands mean. By integrating Web-scale knowledge from the vision-language model, our complete system was able to solve such tasks, deriving the semantic concepts (in this case, spatial relations) from Internet-scale training, and the physical behaviors (picking up and moving objects) from multirobot RT-X data. To our surprise, we found that the inclusion of the multirobot data improved the Google robot’s ability to generalize to such tasks by a factor of three. This result suggests that not only was the multirobot RT-X data useful for acquiring a variety of physical skills, it could also help to better connect such skills to the semantic and symbolic knowledge in vision-language models. These connections give the robot a degree of common sense, which could one day enable robots to understand the meaning of complex and nuanced user commands like “Bring me my breakfast” while carrying out the actions to make it happen.

The next steps for RT-X

The RT-X project shows what is possible when the robot-learning community acts together. Because of this cross-institutional effort, we were able to put together a diverse robotic dataset and carry out comprehensive multirobot evaluations that wouldn’t be possible at any single institution. Since the robotics community can’t rely on scraping the Internet for training data, we need to create that data ourselves. We hope that more researchers will contribute their data to the RT-X database and join this collaborative effort. We also hope to provide tools, models, and infrastructure to support cross-embodiment research. We plan to go beyond sharing data across labs, and we hope that RT-X will grow into a collaborative effort to develop data standards, reusable models, and new techniques and algorithms.

Our early results hint at how large cross-embodiment robotics models could transform the field. Much as large language models have mastered a wide range of language-based tasks, in the future we might use the same foundation model as the basis for many real-world robotic tasks. Perhaps new robotic skills could be enabled by fine-tuning or even prompting a pretrained foundation model. In a similar way to how you can prompt ChatGPT to tell a story without first training it on that particular story, you could ask a robot to write “Happy Birthday” on a cake without having to tell it how to use a piping bag or what handwritten text looks like. Of course, much more research is needed for these models to take on that kind of general capability, as our experiments have focused on single arms with two-finger grippers doing simple manipulation tasks.

As more labs engage in cross-embodiment research, we hope to further push the frontier on what is possible with a single neural network that can control many robots. These advances might include adding diverse simulated data from generated environments, handling robots with different numbers of arms or fingers, using different sensor suites (such as depth cameras and tactile sensing), and even combining manipulation and locomotion behaviors. RT-X has opened the door for such work, but the most exciting technical developments are still ahead.

This is just the beginning. We hope that with this first step, we can together create the future of robotics: where general robotic brains can power any robot, benefiting from data shared by all robots around the world.

Musculoskeletal models provide an approach towards simulating the ability of the human body in a variety of human-robot applications. A promising use for musculoskeletal models is to model the physical capabilities of the human body, for example, estimating the strength at the hand. Several methods of modelling and representing human strength with musculoskeletal models have been used in ergonomic analysis, human-robot interaction and robotic assistance. However, it is currently unclear which methods best suit modelling and representing limb strength. This paper compares existing methods for calculating and representing the strength of the upper limb using musculoskeletal models. It then details the differences and relative advantages of the existing methods, enabling the discussion on the appropriateness of each method for particular applications.

Introduction: There has been a surge in the use of social robots for providing information, persuasion, and entertainment in noisy public spaces in recent years. Considering the well-documented negative effect of noise on human cognition, masking sounds have been introduced. Masking sounds work, in principle, by making the intrusive background speeches less intelligible, and hence, less distracting. However, this reduced distraction comes with the cost of increasing annoyance and reduced cognitive performance in the users of masking sounds.

Methods: In a previous study, it was shown that reducing the fundamental frequency of the speech-shaped noise as a masking sound significantly contributes to its being less annoying and more efficient. In this study, the effectiveness of the proposed masking sound was tested on the performance of subjects listening to a lecture given by a social robot in a noisy cocktail party environment.

Results: The results indicate that the presence of the masking sound significantly increased speech comprehension, perceived understandability, acoustic satisfaction, and sound privacy of the individuals listening to the robot in an adverse listening condition.

Discussion: To the knowledge of the authors, no previous work has investigated the application of sound masking technology in human-robot interaction designs. The future directions of this trend are discussed.

In current telerobotics and telemanipulator applications, operators must perform a wide variety of tasks, often with a high risk associated with failure. A system designed to generate data-based behavioural estimations using observed operator features could be used to reduce risks in industrial teleoperation. This paper describes a non-invasive bio-mechanical feature capture method for teleoperators used to trial novel human-error rate estimators which, in future work, are intended to improve operational safety by providing behavioural and postural feedback to the operator. Operator monitoring studies were conducted in situ using the MASCOT teleoperation system at UKAEA RACE; the operators were given controlled tasks to complete during observation. Building upon existing works for vehicle-driver intention estimation and robotic surgery operator analysis, we used 3D point-cloud data capture using a commercially available depth camera to estimate an operator’s skeletal pose. A total of 14 operators were observed and recorded for a total of approximately 8 h, each completing a baseline task and a task designed to induce detectable but safe collisions. Skeletal pose was estimated, collision statistics were recorded, and questionnaire-based psychological assessments were made, providing a database of qualitative and quantitative data. We then trialled data-driven analysis by using statistical and machine learning regression techniques (SVR) to estimate collision rates. We further perform and present an input variable sensitivity analysis for our selected features.



Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Cybathlon Challenges: 02 February 2024, ZURICHEurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS

Enjoy today’s videos!

One approach to robot autonomy is to learn from human demonstration, which can be very effective as long as you have enough high quality data to work with. Mobile ALOHA is a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for data collection from Stanford’s IRIS Lab, and under the control of an experienced human, it can do pretty much everything we’ve ever fantasized about home robots doing for us.

[ Stanford ]

Researchers at SEAS and the BU’s Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences used a soft, wearable robot to help a person living with Parkinson’s walk without freezing. The robotic garment, worn around the hips and thighs, gives a gentle push to the hips as the leg swings, helping the patient achieve a longer stride. The research demonstrates the potential of soft robotics to treat a potentially dangerous symptom of Parkinson’s disease and could allow people living with the disease to regain their mobility and independence.

[ Harvard SEAS ]

Happy 2024 from SkyMul!

[ SkyMul ]

Thanks, Eohan!

As the holiday season approaches, we at Kawasaki Robotics (USA), Inc. wanted to take a moment to express our warmest wishes to you. May your holidays be filled with joy, love, and peace, and may the New Year bring you prosperity, success, and happiness. From our team to yours, we wish you a very happy holiday season and a wonderful New Year ahead.

[ Kawasaki Robotics ]

Aurora Flight Sciences is working on a new X-plane for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program. X-65 is purpose-designed for testing and demonstrating the benefits of active flow control (AFC) at tactically relevant scale and flight conditions.

[ Aurora ]

Well, this is the craziest piece of immersive robotic teleop hardware I’ve ever seen.

[ Jinkisha ]

Looks like Moley Robotics is still working on the least practical robotic kitchen ever.

[ Moley ]



Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Cybathlon Challenges: 02 February 2024, ZURICHEurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCEICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPANRoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS

Enjoy today’s videos!

One approach to robot autonomy is to learn from human demonstration, which can be very effective as long as you have enough high quality data to work with. Mobile ALOHA is a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for data collection from Stanford’s IRIS Lab, and under the control of an experienced human, it can do pretty much everything we’ve ever fantasized about home robots doing for us.

[ Stanford ]

Researchers at SEAS and the BU’s Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences used a soft, wearable robot to help a person living with Parkinson’s walk without freezing. The robotic garment, worn around the hips and thighs, gives a gentle push to the hips as the leg swings, helping the patient achieve a longer stride. The research demonstrates the potential of soft robotics to treat a potentially dangerous symptom of Parkinson’s disease and could allow people living with the disease to regain their mobility and independence.

[ Harvard SEAS ]

Happy 2024 from SkyMul!

[ SkyMul ]

Thanks, Eohan!

As the holiday season approaches, we at Kawasaki Robotics (USA), Inc. wanted to take a moment to express our warmest wishes to you. May your holidays be filled with joy, love, and peace, and may the New Year bring you prosperity, success, and happiness. From our team to yours, we wish you a very happy holiday season and a wonderful New Year ahead.

[ Kawasaki Robotics ]

Aurora Flight Sciences is working on a new X-plane for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program. X-65 is purpose-designed for testing and demonstrating the benefits of active flow control (AFC) at tactically relevant scale and flight conditions.

[ Aurora ]

Well, this is the craziest piece of immersive robotic teleop hardware I’ve ever seen.

[ Jinkisha ]

Looks like Moley Robotics is still working on the least practical robotic kitchen ever.

[ Moley ]

Introduction: Preventive control is a critical feature in autonomous technology to ensure safe system operations. One application where safety is most important is robot-assisted needle interventions. During incisions into a tissue, adverse events such as mechanical buckling of the needle shaft and tissue displacements can occur on encounter with stiff membranes causing potential damage to the organ.

Methods: To prevent these events before they occur, we propose a new control subroutine that autonomously chooses a) a reactive mechanism to stop the insertion procedure when a needle buckling or a severe tissue displacement event is predicted and b) an adaptive mechanism to continue the insertion procedure through needle steering control when a mild tissue displacement is detected. The subroutine is developed using a model-free control technique due to the nonlinearities of the unknown needle-tissue dynamics. First, an improved version of the model-free adaptive control (IMFAC) is developed by computing a fast time-varying partial pseudo derivative analytically from the dynamic linearization equation to enhance output convergence and robustness against external disturbances.

Results and Discussion: Comparing IMFAC and MFAC algorithms on simulated nonlinear systems in MATLAB, IMFAC shows 20% faster output convergence against arbitrary disturbances. Next, IMFAC is integrated with event prediction algorithms from prior work to prevent adverse events during needle insertions in real time. Needle insertions in gelatin tissues with known environments show successful prevention of needle buckling and tissue displacement events. Needle insertions in biological tissues with unknown environments are performed using live fluoroscopic imaging as ground truth to verify timely prevention of adverse events. Finally, statistical ANOVA analysis on all insertion data shows the robustness of the prevention algorithm to various needles and tissue environments. Overall, the success rate of preventing adverse events in needle insertions through adaptive and reactive control was 95%, which is important toward achieving safety in robotic needle interventions.

Introduction: Human–robot teams are being called upon to accomplish increasingly complex tasks. During execution, the robot may operate at different levels of autonomy (LOAs), ranging from full robotic autonomy to full human control. For any number of reasons, such as changes in the robot’s surroundings due to the complexities of operating in dynamic and uncertain environments, degradation and damage to the robot platform, or changes in tasking, adjusting the LOA during operations may be necessary to achieve desired mission outcomes. Thus, a critical challenge is understanding when and how the autonomy should be adjusted.

Methods: We frame this problem with respect to the robot’s capabilities and limitations, known as robot competency. With this framing, a robot could be granted a level of autonomy in line with its ability to operate with a high degree of competence. First, we propose a Model Quality Assessment metric, which indicates how (un)expected an autonomous robot’s observations are compared to its model predictions. Next, we present an Event-Triggered Generalized Outcome Assessment (ET-GOA) algorithm that uses changes in the Model Quality Assessment above a threshold to selectively execute and report a high-level assessment of the robot’s competency. We validated the Model Quality Assessment metric and the ET-GOA algorithm in both simulated and live robot navigation scenarios.

Results: Our experiments found that the Model Quality Assessment was able to respond to unexpected observations. Additionally, our validation of the full ET-GOA algorithm explored how the computational cost and accuracy of the algorithm was impacted across several Model Quality triggering thresholds and with differing amounts of state perturbations.

Discussion: Our experimental results combined with a human-in-the-loop demonstration show that Event-Triggered Generalized Outcome Assessment algorithm can facilitate informed autonomy-adjustment decisions based on a robot’s task competency.

Soft pneumatic artificial muscles are a well actuation scheme in soft robotics due to its key features for robotic machines being safe, lightweight, and conformable. In this work, we present a versatile vacuum-powered artificial muscle (VPAM) with manually tunable output motion. We developed an artificial muscle that consists of a stack of air chambers that can use replaceable external reinforcements. Different modes of operation are achieved by assembling different reinforcements that constrain the output motion of the actuator during actuation. We designed replaceable external reinforcements to produce single motions such as twisting, bending, shearing and rotary. We then conducted a deformation and lifting force characterization for these motions. We demonstrated sophisticated motions and reusability of the artificial muscle in two soft machines with different modes of locomotion. Our results show that our VPAM is reusable and versatile producing a variety and sophisticated output motions if needed. This key feature specially benefits unpredicted workspaces that require a soft actuator that can be adjusted for other tasks. Our scheme has the potential to offer new strategies for locomotion in machines for underwater or terrestrial operation, and wearable devices with different modes of operation.

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