The concept of Industry 4.0 brings the change of industry manufacturing patterns that become more efficient and more flexible. In response to this tendency, an efficient robot teaching approach without complex programming has become a popular research direction. Therefore, we propose an interactive finger-touch based robot teaching schema using a multimodal 3D image (color (RGB), thermal (T) and point cloud (3D)) processing. Here, the resulting heat trace touching the object surface will be analyzed on multimodal data, in order to precisely identify the true hand/object contact points. These identified contact points are used to calculate the robot path directly. To optimize the identification of the contact points we propose a calculation scheme using a number of anchor points which are first predicted by hand/object point cloud segmentation. Subsequently a probability density function is defined to calculate the prior probability distribution of true finger trace. The temperature in the neighborhood of each anchor point is then dynamically analyzed to calculate the likelihood. Experiments show that the trajectories estimated by our multimodal method have significantly better accuracy and smoothness than only by analyzing point cloud and static temperature distribution.
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This morning, drone-delivery company Zipline announced a new drone-delivery system offering nearly silent, precise delivery that’s intended to expand the company’s capabilities into home delivery. This requires a much different approach from what Zipline has been doing for the past eight years. In order to make home deliveries that are quiet and precise, Zipline has developed a creative new combination of hybrid drones, “droids,” and all the supporting hardware necessary to make deliveries directly to your front porch.
We visited one of Zipline’s distribution centers in Rwanda a few years ago to see how effective their system was at delivering blood across the country’s rugged terrain. To watch a delivery take place, we drove an hour over winding dirt roads to a rural hospital. Shortly after we arrived, a drone made the trip and delivered a package of blood in about 14 minutes. It was a compelling example of the value of drone delivery in situations where you have critical and time-sensitive goods in areas of low infrastructure, but the challenges of urban home delivery are something else entirely.
The way that Zipline’s current generation of fixed-wing delivery drones work is by dropping boxes tethered to small parachutes while flying several tens of meters over an open delivery area. You need some obstacle-free space for this to work reliably (say, a handful of empty parking spaces or the equivalent), and it’s not a particularly gentle process, meaning that there are some constraints on what you can deliver and how it’s packaged. For hospitals and health centers, this is usually no problem. For your home, it very well may not be an option at all.
Zipline’s new drones are much different. In a heavily produced online event featuring the Zipline team alongside Rwandan president Paul Kagame and company board member Bono, Zipline introduced P2, a new delivery system that combines a hybrid fixed-wing drone with a small tethered droid that can drop out of the belly of the drone to make precision deliveries.
Housed within the P2 Zip, the droid and whatever it’s carrying can travel at 112 kilometers per hour through all kinds of weather out to a service radius of about 16 km with an impressive 2.5- to 3.5-kilogram payload. Once the P2 reaches its delivery destination, the Zip hovers at a few hundred feet while an integrated winch lowers the droid and the package down to the ground. The Zip remains at a height that is both safe and quiet while the droid uses integrated thrusters to accurately position itself over the delivery zone, which at just half a meter across could easily be the top of a picnic table. Visual sensors on the droid make sure that the delivery zone is clear. As soon as it touches down, the droid drops its cargo out of its belly. Then it gets winched back up into the Zip, and the team heads back home.
On the other end of things, there’s an integrated loading system where the P2 Zips can be charging outdoors (using an interesting overhead charging system) while the droids drop down a chute to be loaded indoors one by one.
While the event didn’t show a complete delivery cycle, we’re told that all of the hardware is operational and very close to a production design, and that all of the delivery steps have been successfully completed with real aircraft. There’s still a lot of testing to be done, of course, and Zipline expects to have 10,000 flights completed over the summer, with its first deployment to follow. Initial customers include a couple of regional health systems in the United States, Sweetgreen restaurants, and the government of Rwanda, with President Kagame himself as the very first customer. And to be clear, the P2 is not replacing Zipline’s original drone-delivery infrastructure—with their 100-km range, the original Zips (now called the P1) are still keeping quite busy delivering critical goods in Rwanda and elsewhere around the world.
This morning, drone-delivery company Zipline announced a new drone-delivery system offering nearly silent, precise delivery that’s intended to expand the company’s capabilities into home delivery. This requires a much different approach from what Zipline has been doing for the past eight years. In order to make home deliveries that are quiet and precise, Zipline has developed a creative new combination of hybrid drones, “droids,” and all the supporting hardware necessary to make deliveries directly to your front porch.
We visited one of Zipline’s distribution centers in Rwanda a few years ago to see how effective their system was at delivering blood across the country’s rugged terrain. To watch a delivery take place, we drove an hour over winding dirt roads to a rural hospital. Shortly after we arrived, a drone made the trip and delivered a package of blood in about 14 minutes. It was a compelling example of the value of drone delivery in situations where you have critical and time-sensitive goods in areas of low infrastructure, but the challenges of urban home delivery are something else entirely.
The way that Zipline’s current generation of fixed-wing delivery drones work is by dropping boxes tethered to small parachutes while flying several tens of meters over an open delivery area. You need some obstacle-free space for this to work reliably (say, a handful of empty parking spaces or the equivalent), and it’s not a particularly gentle process, meaning that there are some constraints on what you can deliver and how it’s packaged. For hospitals and health centers, this is usually no problem. For your home, it very well may not be an option at all.
Zipline’s new drones are much different. In a heavily produced online event featuring the Zipline team alongside Rwandan president Paul Kagame and company board member Bono, Zipline introduced P2, a new delivery system that combines a hybrid fixed-wing drone with a small tethered droid that can drop out of the belly of the drone to make precision deliveries.
Housed within the P2 Zip, the droid and whatever it’s carrying can travel at 112 kilometers per hour through all kinds of weather out to a service radius of about 16 km with an impressive 2.5- to 3.5-kilogram payload. Once the P2 reaches its delivery destination, the Zip hovers at a few hundred feet while an integrated winch lowers the droid and the package down to the ground. The Zip remains at a height that is both safe and quiet while the droid uses integrated thrusters to accurately position itself over the delivery zone, which at just half a meter across could easily be the top of a picnic table. Visual sensors on the droid make sure that the delivery zone is clear. As soon as it touches down, the droid drops its cargo out of its belly. Then it gets winched back up into the Zip, and the team heads back home.
On the other end of things, there’s an integrated loading system where the P2 Zips can be charging outdoors (using an interesting overhead charging system) while the droids drop down a chute to be loaded indoors one by one.
While the event didn’t show a complete delivery cycle, we’re told that all of the hardware is operational and very close to a production design, and that all of the delivery steps have been successfully completed with real aircraft. There’s still a lot of testing to be done, of course, and Zipline expects to have 10,000 flights completed over the summer, with its first deployment to follow. Initial customers include a couple of regional health systems in the United States, Sweetgreen restaurants, and the government of Rwanda, with President Kagame himself as the very first customer. And to be clear, the P2 is not replacing Zipline’s original drone-delivery infrastructure—with their 100-km range, the original Zips (now called the P1) are still keeping quite busy delivering critical goods in Rwanda and elsewhere around the world.
Reproducibility of results is, in all research fields, the cornerstone of the scientific method and the minimum standard for assessing the value of scientific claims and conclusions drawn by other scientists. It requires a systematic approach and accurate description of the experimental procedure and data analysis, which allows other scientists to follow the steps described in the published work and obtain the “same results.” In general and in different research contexts with “same” results, we mean different things. It can be almost identical measures in a fully deterministic experiment or “validation of a hypothesis” or statistically similar results in a non-deterministic context. Unfortunately, it has been shown by systematic meta-analysis studies that many findings in fields like psychology, sociology, medicine, and economics do not hold up when other researchers try to replicate them. Many scientific fields are experiencing what is generally referred to as a “reproducibility crisis,” which undermines the trust in published results, imposes a thorough revision of the methodology in scientific research, and makes progress difficult. In general, the reproducibility of experiments is not a mainstream practice in artificial intelligence and robotics research. Surgical robotics is no exception. There is a need for developing new tools and putting in place a community effort to allow the transition to more reproducible research and hence faster progress in research. Reproducibility, replicability, and benchmarking (operational procedures for the assessment and comparison of research results) are made more complex for medical robotics and surgical systems, due to patenting, safety, and ethical issues. In this review paper, we selected 10 relevant published manuscripts on surgical robotics to analyze their clinical applicability and underline the problems related to reproducibility of the reported experiments, with the aim of finding possible solutions to the challenges that limit the translation of many scientific research studies into real-world applications and slow down research progress.
Fiber reinforced soft pneumatic actuators are hard to control due to their non-linear behavior and non-uniformity introduced by the fabrication process. Model-based controllers generally have difficulty compensating non-uniform and non-linear material behaviors, whereas model-free approaches are harder to interpret and tune intuitively. In this study, we present the design, fabrication, characterization, and control of a fiber reinforced soft pneumatic module with an outer diameter size of 12 mm. Specifically, we utilized the characterization data to adaptively control the soft pneumatic actuator. From the measured characterization data, we fitted mapping functions between the actuator input pressures and the actuator space angles. These maps were used to construct the feedforward control signal and tune the feedback controller adaptively depending on the actuator bending configuration. The performance of the proposed control approach is experimentally validated by comparing the measured 2D tip orientation against the reference trajectory. The adaptive controller was able to successfully follow the prescribed trajectory with a mean absolute error of 0.68° for the magnitude of the bending angle and 3.5° for the bending phase around the axial direction. The data-driven control method introduced in this paper may offer a solution to intuitively tune and control soft pneumatic actuators, compensating for their non-uniform and non-linear behavior.
The 2023 ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference (HRI) is taking place this week in Stockholm, with the theme of “HRI for all.” It’s a good theme, promoting diversity and inclusion, but it’s also a good reminder that all robots have (or should have) some thought put into how they interact with humans. HRI isn’t just for social robots. Even the most industrial of industrial robots, the lights-out manufacturing sorts of things that may never see a human while operating unless something is (or is about to be) very very wrong, still have to be set up and programmed by a human. And those humans are happiest when engineers remember that they exist.
Anyway, there will be a bunch of interesting research presented at HRI (the proceedings are already online here), but to kick things off we’re taking a look at the annual HRI Student Design Competition, which is always creative and fun.
The theme for this year’s Student Design Competition is “Affordable Robots.“ Student teams are asked to create and describe a scenario with robots/agents that are affordable and have a real-life utility in society. More specifically, we are looking for affordable, impactful, scalable, and reliable use cases with real-world application potential. Since the theme of this year’s conference is “HRI for all,” we also recommend that students think about inclusion and diversity in HRI in terms of geographical inclusion (both for the developed and developing world), gender inclusion, ethnic inclusion, disability, equity, etc. related to this theme.This combination of “affordable” and “real-life utility” is especially challenging, since robots are by nature not affordable at all, and utility (in the sense of functionality that justifies their cost) is an elusive goal, which is why this is exactly the kind of problem you want students to tackle. There are 20 entries this year, and we can only share a few of them, but here are five that we thought were particularly interesting.
Aimoji: An affordable interaction kit that upcycles used toys as companion robotsWhen a child wants to talk with a toy, usually it is a one-way interaction, with the child imagining the toy’s responses. Our design enables every toy to have a two-way interaction using our low-cost interaction kit. The reaction of the toy is based on a motion sensor that triggers the toy to respond to the child through a screen attached to the toy. Through this method, every child can experience human-robot interaction in an affordable way. There can be as many robots as the number of toys.
Toubot: A pair of wearable haptic robots linking left-behind children and their parents emotionally Children who are left behind have more mental problems than their urban peers because they have fewer instant emotional interactions with their parents. In order to solve this, we propose a pair of wearable soft robots that strengthen their emotional bond by enhancing instant nonverbal interactions.
Internet of robotic cat toys to deepen bond and elevate mood Pets provide important mental support for human beings. Recent advancements in robotics and HRI have led to research and commercial products providing smart solutions to enrich indoor pets’ lives. However, most of these products focus on satisfying pets’ basic needs, such as feeding and litter cleaning, rather than their mental well-being. In this paper, we present the internet of robotic cat toys, where a group of robotic agents connects to play with our furry friends. Through three iterations, we demonstrate an affordable and flexible design of clip-on robotic agents to transform a static household into an interactive wonderland for pets.
Labo is watching you: A robot that persuades you from smartphone interruption The endogenous interruptions of smartphones have impacted people’s everyday life in many aspects, especially in the study and work areas under a lamp. To mitigate this, we make a robot that could persuade you intrinsically by augmenting the lamp on your desk with specific postures and light.
Toaster bot: Designing for utility and enjoyability in the kitchen space Toasting bread is a seemingly mundane task that people perform on a daily basis, whether in a private kitchen area or in a communal dining space. This paper presents a robotic toaster, or “toaster bot,” that is designed with animated movements to enhance the toast-making experience, not only by assisting in completing the task itself but also by acting as a playful entity with whom users may interact.
The 2023 ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference (HRI) is taking place this week in Stockholm, with the theme of “HRI for all.” It’s a good theme, promoting diversity and inclusion, but it’s also a good reminder that all robots have (or should have) some thought put into how they interact with humans. HRI isn’t just for social robots. Even the most industrial of industrial robots, the lights-out manufacturing sorts of things that may never see a human while operating unless something is (or is about to be) very very wrong, still have to be set up and programmed by a human. And those humans are happiest when engineers remember that they exist.
Anyway, there will be a bunch of interesting research presented at HRI (the proceedings are already online here), but to kick things off we’re taking a look at the annual HRI Student Design Competition, which is always creative and fun.
The theme for this year’s Student Design Competition is “Affordable Robots.“ Student teams are asked to create and describe a scenario with robots/agents that are affordable and have a real-life utility in society. More specifically, we are looking for affordable, impactful, scalable, and reliable use cases with real-world application potential. Since the theme of this year’s conference is “HRI for all,” we also recommend that students think about inclusion and diversity in HRI in terms of geographical inclusion (both for the developed and developing world), gender inclusion, ethnic inclusion, disability, equity, etc. related to this theme.This combination of “affordable” and “real-life utility” is especially challenging, since robots are by nature not affordable at all, and utility (in the sense of functionality that justifies their cost) is an elusive goal, which is why this is exactly the kind of problem you want students to tackle. There are 20 entries this year, and we can only share a few of them, but here are five that we thought were particularly interesting.
Aimoji: An affordable interaction kit that upcycles used toys as companion robotsWhen a child wants to talk with a toy, usually it is a one-way interaction, with the child imagining the toy’s responses. Our design enables every toy to have a two-way interaction using our low-cost interaction kit. The reaction of the toy is based on a motion sensor that triggers the toy to respond to the child through a screen attached to the toy. Through this method, every child can experience human-robot interaction in an affordable way. There can be as many robots as the number of toys.
Toubot: A pair of wearable haptic robots linking left-behind children and their parents emotionally Children who are left behind have more mental problems than their urban peers because they have fewer instant emotional interactions with their parents. In order to solve this, we propose a pair of wearable soft robots that strengthen their emotional bond by enhancing instant nonverbal interactions.
Internet of robotic cat toys to deepen bond and elevate mood Pets provide important mental support for human beings. Recent advancements in robotics and HRI have led to research and commercial products providing smart solutions to enrich indoor pets’ lives. However, most of these products focus on satisfying pets’ basic needs, such as feeding and litter cleaning, rather than their mental well-being. In this paper, we present the internet of robotic cat toys, where a group of robotic agents connects to play with our furry friends. Through three iterations, we demonstrate an affordable and flexible design of clip-on robotic agents to transform a static household into an interactive wonderland for pets.
Labo is watching you: A robot that persuades you from smartphone interruption The endogenous interruptions of smartphones have impacted people’s everyday life in many aspects, especially in the study and work areas under a lamp. To mitigate this, we make a robot that could persuade you intrinsically by augmenting the lamp on your desk with specific postures and light.
Toaster bot: Designing for utility and enjoyability in the kitchen space Toasting bread is a seemingly mundane task that people perform on a daily basis, whether in a private kitchen area or in a communal dining space. This paper presents a robotic toaster, or “toaster bot,” that is designed with animated movements to enhance the toast-making experience, not only by assisting in completing the task itself but also by acting as a playful entity with whom users may interact.
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.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Agilicious is a co-designed hardware and software framework tailored to autonomous, agile quadrotor flight, which has been developed and used since 2016 at the Robotics and Perception Group of the University of Zurich. Agilicious is completely open-source and open hardware and supports both model-based and neural-network-based controllers![ Agilicious ]
Flexiv’s adaptive robot masseur fuses force control, computer vision, and artificial intelligence to emulate the skill and dexterity of a human massage therapist.[ Flexiv ]
Freely inspired by Jean de la Fontaine’s “The Wolf and the Lamb”, Coperni’s fashion show in Paris. features the Spot robots from Boston Dynamics in relation with human beings. Unlike the original fable written in the 17th century, which raises questions relating to the balance of power between the human groups that make up society, Coperni reinterprets the story and transposes it to the year of 2023 with a positive vision of the future. The figure of the wolf is replaced by Spot robots, whereas the lambs by human beings. The fashion show tells the story of their meeting, their mutual taming and their cohabitation. The show presents Coperni’s vision which is that there is neither a dominant nor a dominated, but that the mankind and machine live in harmony.[ Coperni ]
Meet the third-generation prototype Honda Autonomous Work Vehicle (AWV), a new category of capable work vehicle that can operate autonomously in a variety of dynamic work environments. The Honda AWV has the potential to bring greater efficiencies, enhanced workforce productivity, and better environmental performance to the construction industry, and to other industries seeking an autonomous off-road solution.[ Honda ]
Skydio’s partnership with WeRobotics provides microgrant scholarships to Flying Labs across the globe, with Nepal Flying Labs being selected as a recipient for their project to create a digital twin of Changu Narayan Temple, the oldest temple in Kathmandu Valley, dating back to the 5th Century.[ Skydio ]
This is perhaps the jauntiest gait I have ever seen in a humanoid robot.
[ GitHub ]
Interesting “autoloader” for Wing delivery drones.
[ Wing ]
In this video, we showcase how robots can learn from human experts to master complex task sequencing in various manufacturing processes, such as surface finishing and composite layup. We demonstrate how robots can learn the expert’s task sequencing policies for composite layup task and perform execution on a brand new test part.[ USC Viterbi ]
We present a sim-to-real learning-based approach for real-world humanoid locomotion. We do not use state estimation, dynamics models, trajectory optimization, reference trajectories, or pre-computed gait libraries. Our controller is trained with large-scale model-free reinforcement learning on an ensemble of randomized environments in simulation and deployed to the real world in a zero-shot fashion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a fully learning-based method for real-world full-sized humanoid locomotion.[ Paper ]
Roboball? Roboball.
[ Texas A&M ]
This work addresses the problem of active collaborative localization of robot teams with unknown data association. In particular, it involves positioning a small number of identical unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) at desired positions so that an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can, through unlabelled measurements of UGVs, uniquely determine its global pose. This work enables robust localization in perceptually challenged GPS-denied environments, thus paving the road for large-scale multi-robot navigation and mapping.[ UPenn ]
This work presents a multi-segment vine robot that can navigate complex paths without interacting with its environment. This is achieved by a new steering method that selectively actuates each single pouch at the tip, providing high degrees of freedom with few control inputs.[ Paper ]
TBNET and DEEP Robotics deployed Jueying X20 quadruped robot with two high-precision surveying and mapping equipment. It has completed on-site data collection in the complex terrain of real scenes such as indoor and outdoor construction sites, electric tower groups, railways, underground garages, and ancient buildings.[ DeepRobotics ]
Here’s a quick look at RoMeLa’s novel robotic limb EEMMMa (Elastic Extending Mechanism for Mobility and Manipulation), a long-reach steel tentacle that can both extend and bend. It can be used to deploy grappling hooks for climbing, and morph its shape to bend around obstacles. This can allow it to place cameras and retrieve samples from hard-to-reach places. The limb’s unique tape spring construction results in a versatile, lightweight, and compact system. This can enable future mobile robots to move easily and safely through highly unstructured terrain such as forests or cave systems.[ RoMeLa ]
Micro Robots are a revolutionary new technology that could change how we interact with the world around us. For the first time, a collaborative research team of electrical and computer engineers, with support from NSF, has installed electronic brains on solar-powered microbots the size of a human hair. One of the biggest challenges is their small size-requiring external control, such as a computer or smartphone, limiting their range and making the bots difficult to manipulate remotely until now.[ NSF ]
A team of scientists, engineers, and designers embark on an Arctic expedition to test space technology. The MIT Space Exploration Initiative expedition in Svalbard was not simply a space analog mission, but an experience to learn how to help enable better access to remote regions from the far corners of planet Earth, to the Moon, and Mars.[ MIT ]
The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, has the most advanced autonomous driving capability ever flown to Mars. Having such an advanced capability contributes to the rover’s challenging mission to discover signs of life that may have existed on Mars in a distant past. This talk provides an overview on the current research and development efforts on robotics autonomy at JPL, with an emphasis on enhancing the safety, efficiency, and performance of robotic mobility through the applications of risk-aware decision making and machine learning.[ JPL ]
An interactive webinar discussing the potential and the path toward general-purpose robotic manipulation. This will be the first in a series, hosted by Northwestern’s Center for Robotics and Biosystems, devoted to this grand challenge of robotics.[ Northwestern ]
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.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Agilicious is a co-designed hardware and software framework tailored to autonomous, agile quadrotor flight, which has been developed and used since 2016 at the Robotics and Perception Group of the University of Zurich. Agilicious is completely open-source and open hardware and supports both model-based and neural-network-based controllers![ Agilicious ]
Flexiv’s adaptive robot masseur fuses force control, computer vision, and artificial intelligence to emulate the skill and dexterity of a human massage therapist.[ Flexiv ]
Freely inspired by Jean de la Fontaine’s “The Wolf and the Lamb”, Coperni’s fashion show in Paris. features the Spot robots from Boston Dynamics in relation with human beings. Unlike the original fable written in the 17th century, which raises questions relating to the balance of power between the human groups that make up society, Coperni reinterprets the story and transposes it to the year of 2023 with a positive vision of the future. The figure of the wolf is replaced by Spot robots, whereas the lambs by human beings. The fashion show tells the story of their meeting, their mutual taming and their cohabitation. The show presents Coperni’s vision which is that there is neither a dominant nor a dominated, but that the mankind and machine live in harmony.[ Coperni ]
Meet the third-generation prototype Honda Autonomous Work Vehicle (AWV), a new category of capable work vehicle that can operate autonomously in a variety of dynamic work environments. The Honda AWV has the potential to bring greater efficiencies, enhanced workforce productivity, and better environmental performance to the construction industry, and to other industries seeking an autonomous off-road solution.[ Honda ]
Skydio’s partnership with WeRobotics provides microgrant scholarships to Flying Labs across the globe, with Nepal Flying Labs being selected as a recipient for their project to create a digital twin of Changu Narayan Temple, the oldest temple in Kathmandu Valley, dating back to the 5th Century.[ Skydio ]
This is perhaps the jauntiest gait I have ever seen in a humanoid robot.
[ GitHub ]
Interesting “autoloader” for Wing delivery drones.
[ Wing ]
In this video, we showcase how robots can learn from human experts to master complex task sequencing in various manufacturing processes, such as surface finishing and composite layup. We demonstrate how robots can learn the expert’s task sequencing policies for composite layup task and perform execution on a brand new test part.[ USC Viterbi ]
We present a sim-to-real learning-based approach for real-world humanoid locomotion. We do not use state estimation, dynamics models, trajectory optimization, reference trajectories, or pre-computed gait libraries. Our controller is trained with large-scale model-free reinforcement learning on an ensemble of randomized environments in simulation and deployed to the real world in a zero-shot fashion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a fully learning-based method for real-world full-sized humanoid locomotion.[ Paper ]
Roboball? Roboball.
[ Texas A&M ]
This work addresses the problem of active collaborative localization of robot teams with unknown data association. In particular, it involves positioning a small number of identical unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) at desired positions so that an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can, through unlabelled measurements of UGVs, uniquely determine its global pose. This work enables robust localization in perceptually challenged GPS-denied environments, thus paving the road for large-scale multi-robot navigation and mapping.[ UPenn ]
This work presents a multi-segment vine robot that can navigate complex paths without interacting with its environment. This is achieved by a new steering method that selectively actuates each single pouch at the tip, providing high degrees of freedom with few control inputs.[ Paper ]
TBNET and DEEP Robotics deployed Jueying X20 quadruped robot with two high-precision surveying and mapping equipment. It has completed on-site data collection in the complex terrain of real scenes such as indoor and outdoor construction sites, electric tower groups, railways, underground garages, and ancient buildings.[ DeepRobotics ]
Here’s a quick look at RoMeLa’s novel robotic limb EEMMMa (Elastic Extending Mechanism for Mobility and Manipulation), a long-reach steel tentacle that can both extend and bend. It can be used to deploy grappling hooks for climbing, and morph its shape to bend around obstacles. This can allow it to place cameras and retrieve samples from hard-to-reach places. The limb’s unique tape spring construction results in a versatile, lightweight, and compact system. This can enable future mobile robots to move easily and safely through highly unstructured terrain such as forests or cave systems.[ RoMeLa ]
Micro Robots are a revolutionary new technology that could change how we interact with the world around us. For the first time, a collaborative research team of electrical and computer engineers, with support from NSF, has installed electronic brains on solar-powered microbots the size of a human hair. One of the biggest challenges is their small size-requiring external control, such as a computer or smartphone, limiting their range and making the bots difficult to manipulate remotely until now.[ NSF ]
A team of scientists, engineers, and designers embark on an Arctic expedition to test space technology. The MIT Space Exploration Initiative expedition in Svalbard was not simply a space analog mission, but an experience to learn how to help enable better access to remote regions from the far corners of planet Earth, to the Moon, and Mars.[ MIT ]
The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, has the most advanced autonomous driving capability ever flown to Mars. Having such an advanced capability contributes to the rover’s challenging mission to discover signs of life that may have existed on Mars in a distant past. This talk provides an overview on the current research and development efforts on robotics autonomy at JPL, with an emphasis on enhancing the safety, efficiency, and performance of robotic mobility through the applications of risk-aware decision making and machine learning.[ JPL ]
An interactive webinar discussing the potential and the path toward general-purpose robotic manipulation. This will be the first in a series, hosted by Northwestern’s Center for Robotics and Biosystems, devoted to this grand challenge of robotics.[ Northwestern ]
Awareness of catheter tip interaction forces is a crucial aspect during cardiac ablation procedures. The most important contact forces are the ones that originate between the catheter tip and the beating cardiac tissue. Clinical studies have shown that effective ablation occurs when contact forces are in the proximity of 0.2 N. Lower contact forces lead to ineffective ablation, while higher contact forces may result in complications such as cardiac perforation. Accurate and high resolution force sensing is therefore indispensable in such critical situations. Accordingly, this work presents the development of a unique and novel catheter tip force sensor utilizing a multi-core fiber with inscribed fiber Bragg gratings. A customizable helical compression spring is designed to serve as the flexural component relaying external forces to the multi-core fiber. The limited number of components, simple construction, and compact nature of the sensor makes it an appealing solution towards clinical translation. An elaborated approach is proposed for the design and dimensioning of the necessary sensor components. The approach also presents a unique method to decouple longitudinal and lateral force measurements. A force sensor prototype and a dedicated calibration setup are developed to experimentally validate the theoretical performance. Results show that the proposed force sensor exhibits 7.4 mN longitudinal resolution, 0.8 mN lateral resolution, 0.72 mN mean longitudinal error, 0.96 mN mean lateral error, a high repeatability, and excellent decoupling between longitudinal and lateral forces.
A new effort is weaving Zero Trust capabilities into every level of RISC-V hardware and software design, showing tremendous promise, and helping secure autonomous systems from malicious attacks.
A new effort is weaving Zero Trust capabilities into every level of RISC-V hardware and software design, showing tremendous promise, and helping secure autonomous systems from malicious attacks.
Community effort can create a standard virtual machine monitor to tune seL4 for various use cases to simplify the development of secure hardware.
Community effort can create a standard virtual machine monitor to tune seL4 for various use cases to simplify the development of secure hardware.
Objective: To characterize a socially active humanoid robot’s therapeutic interaction as a therapeutic assistant when providing arm rehabilitation (i.e., arm basis training (ABT) for moderate-to-severe arm paresis or arm ability training (AAT) for mild arm paresis) to stroke survivors when using the digital therapeutic system Evidence-Based Robot-Assistant in Neurorehabilitation (E-BRAiN) and to compare it to human therapists’ interaction.
Methods: Participants and therapy: Seventeen stroke survivors receiving arm rehabilitation (i.e., ABT [n = 9] or AAT [n = 8]) using E-BRAiN over a course of nine sessions and twenty-one other stroke survivors receiving arm rehabilitation sessions (i.e., ABT [n = 6] or AAT [n = 15]) in a conventional 1:1 therapist–patient setting. Analysis of therapeutic interaction: Therapy sessions were videotaped, and all therapeutic interactions (information provision, feedback, and bond-related interaction) were documented offline both in terms of their frequency of occurrence and time used for the respective type of interaction using the instrument THER-I-ACT. Statistical analyses: The therapeutic interaction of the humanoid robot, supervising staff/therapists, and helpers on day 1 is reported as mean across subjects for each type of therapy (i.e., ABT and AAT) as descriptive statistics. Effects of time (day 1 vs. day 9) on the humanoid robot interaction were analyzed by repeated-measures analysis of variance (rmANOVA) together with the between-subject factor type of therapy (ABT vs. AAT). The between-subject effect of the agent (humanoid robot vs. human therapist; day 1) was analyzed together with the factor therapy (ABT vs. AAT) by ANOVA.
Main results and interpretation: The overall pattern of the therapeutic interaction by the humanoid robot was comprehensive and varied considerably with the type of therapy (as clinically indicated and intended), largely comparable to human therapists’ interaction, and adapted according to needs for interaction over time. Even substantially long robot-assisted therapy sessions seemed acceptable to stroke survivors and promoted engaged patients’ training behavior.
Conclusion: Humanoid robot interaction as implemented in the digital system E-BRAiN matches the human therapeutic interaction and its modification across therapies well and promotes engaged training behavior by patients. These characteristics support its clinical use as a therapeutic assistant and, hence, its application to support specific and intensive restorative training for stroke survivors.
Introduction: Measuring kinematic behavior during robot-assisted gait therapy requires either laborious set up of a marker-based motion capture system or relies on the internal sensors of devices that may not cover all relevant degrees of freedom. This presents a major barrier for the adoption of kinematic measurements in the normal clinical schedule. However, to advance the field of robot-assisted therapy many insights could be gained from evaluating patient behavior during regular therapies.
Methods: For this reason, we recently developed and validated a method for extracting kinematics from recordings of a low-cost RGB-D sensor, which relies on a virtual 3D body model to estimate the patient’s body shape and pose in each frame. The present study aimed to evaluate the robustness of the method to the presence of a lower limb exoskeleton. 10 healthy children without gait impairment walked on a treadmill with and without wearing the exoskeleton to evaluate the estimated body shape, and 8 custom stickers were placed on the body to evaluate the accuracy of estimated poses.
Results & Conclusion: We found that the shape is generally robust to wearing the exoskeleton, and systematic pose tracking errors were around 5 mm. Therefore, the method can be a valuable measurement tool for the clinical evaluation, e.g., to measure compensatory movements of the trunk.
The world emits 51 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. To solve the climate crisis, we need to cut this in half by 2030, and get to zero by 2050. For electricity generation, this means the United States alone needs to increase renewable-energy capacities by 10 times over the next 12 years, which roughly translates to a mind-boggling 400,000 more wind turbines and 2.5 billion more solar panels. To accelerate this progress, Congress has recently passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes billions of dollars for clean-energy projects. We will need a lot of workforce to install and maintain these facilities at the front lines, which are not always well suited to humans.
As a roboticist, I see these dull, dirty, and even dangerous tasks as the perfect area for robots. However, there’s a shortage of roboticists tackling climate change, due to a lack of awareness of necessary and urgent applications. After talking with many climate robotics founders for my blog, Nirva Labs, here are my findings on how you can find opportunities to help robots make an impact on climate change.The first robot I built from scratch was SS MAPR, an autonomous boat for water departments to collect multidepth water-quality data. They use this data to monitor river pollution and rein in pollution sources. To this day, it remains the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on. After six months of 80-hour weeks and sleepless nights, SS MAPR was able to finish its maiden voyage with water samples and data collected from the bottom of the Schuylkill River, in Pennsylvania. That was the eureka moment for me: All the prototyping and coding resulted in faster and cheaper access to the data that drives regulatory actions. I want to build more robots that improve the environment we live in.
SS MAPR prepares for its maiden voyage on the Schuylkill River, in Philadelphia.Sherry Chen
Stunned by the rampant wildfires after moving to the Bay Area in 2020, I started Nirva Labs to write about climate robotics opportunities. Surprisingly, many founders I talked with echoed the shortage of roboticists in climate tech. This was disproportionate to the huge potential of robotics for solving climate problems. My personal experience confirmed those observations. At all the robotics events I went to in the Bay Area, one of the biggest robotics hubs in the world, I could barely find anyone working on climate. The investment data backed this up—according to PitchBook, climate robotics accounts for less than 1 percent of total robotics venture funding over the past five years.
Why aren’t there more roboticists working on climate change? After talking to some peers, I realized that from a superficial perspective, climate change doesn’t seem to need robotic inventions—we already have most of the solutions in nonrobotic forms. But that’s exactly why climate change needs robotics to do the repetitive work: to scale up existing solutions so we can get to net zero in time.
Using robots to scale up existing climate solutionsTo understand why robotics is crucial for tackling climate change, we should look to an analogous case: the automotive industry. For a long time, cars were made by humans. In 1925, assembling one Ford Model T required an average assembly speed of 3.76 seconds per part. This was the norm for almost 40 years, before General Motors introduced a robotic arm to assist in the assembly line. Today, assembling a Toyota SUV takes about 2.04 seconds per part, an 84 percent improvement from a century ago—even though the assembly process has exploded in complexity.
This is the sweet spot for robotics—freeing humans from repetitive tasks while increasing efficiency. Climate tech is in a state similar to that of the early automotive industry. Most building blocks of the overall climate solution already exist (for example, solar- and wind-energy generators, electric vehicles, heat pumps) but need to be deployed at scale quickly in order to go from 51 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. By doing what they do best, robots can play a big role in accelerating the fight against climate change by enabling economies of scale.
Finding climate robotics opportunitiesThere are many technically feasible opportunities in climate robotics that can have an impact on the climate, but how do you actually find one? The best way is to deeply learn and understand the life cycle of an existing climate solution and identify how automation can accelerate it. But for any climate solution, it’s important to watch out for its overall climate impact: is it directly mitigating or removing greenhouse gas emissions, helping us adapt to the impacts of climate change, or enhancing our understanding of the climate? The overall impact involves not only the technical solution but also the economic and political forces around it. So it’s important to trace the solution down the entire life cycle and get a full picture of the pros and cons.
Climate robotics opportunities for renewable energyThe renewable-energy sector is a great place to search for climate robotics opportunities. Energy sources like solar and wind are already cost competitive compared with fossil fuel. Robots can help eliminate the bottlenecks that limit their expansion.
Starting from the source of the renewable-energy value chain, robots can help remove the labor bottleneck for installing solar and wind farms. For example, one of the most time-consuming and dangerous tasks in building solar farms is heavy lifting. AES, an energy giant, has developed an automated solar farm construction robot to solve this problem. The robot can automatically install solar panels on pre-installed foundations to free workers from lifting. It is also three times as fast as a human, and the new solar layout can generate twice as much solar energy within the same footprint. This is a great example of how outdoor autonomous navigation and robot manipulator control speeds up the renewable-energy transition.
X Laboratory’s motion-compensation technology helps to boost the number of days that wind turbines can be installed regardless of windy conditions. X Laboratory
Offshore wind-farm construction faces a different challenge, with installations limited from April to November because the high wind conditions in the winter make it challenging for high-precision tasks such as blade installation. X Laboratory, a Dutch company, has developed a motion-compensation technology to keep a crane stable during the blade-installation process, which can increase the wind-speed tolerance and thus increase the installation days to all year round. The team is currently improving the technology to compensate for disturbances from waves, so installation can be done on floating vessels instead of jack-up vessels, which stand on the seabed. This could potentially double the construction speed. This is a creative and effective climate application of robust robot control.
Renewable-energy facilities need routine maintenance to stay efficient. With their rapid expansion over the past decade, there has been a shortage of skilled maintenance technicians. For example, inspecting and repairing onshore wind turbines involves hanging a person 150 meters above the ground, which can be done only by well-trained rope-access technicians. Many wind-farm operators have to hire technicians from out of state at a high cost, which pushes up the overall cost of wind energy.
Many companies have been using automation to solve this problem. Companies like Unleash are using drones to speed up blade inspection, while Aerones has developed a tethered drone supported by a rope system that has a bigger payload and better stability. This expands the task envelope from inspection to cleaning, coating, and simple repairs. Sometimes a creative spin on an existing robot brings a big impact.
Aerones’ tethered drones can assist with maintenance and inspection of wind turbines.Aerones
And there are many more robotics opportunities throughout the renewables value chain. Batteries are an important buffer for renewable energy, which varies throughout the day. However, there is a shortage of critical battery minerals like lithium and cobalt. Companies like Impossible Metals are working on robots to harvest ore nodules from the seabed to alleviate this shortage. On the other end of the battery life cycle, both academia (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and industry (Posh Robotics) have been developing robots to repurpose retired EV batteries, which still have 80 percent storage capacity at the end of their lives and can be used as energy storage for buildings. Robotics speeds up the process and reduces human exposure to toxic chemicals and high voltage levels.
How You Can HelpStay up to date on the climate solutions landscapeFor a bird’s-eye view of the existing solutions, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates and Speed and Scale by John Doerr are both good books to start with. Project Drawdown has also compiled a comprehensive list of existing climate solutions and their estimated impacts. Stay up to date on climate news by following channels like InsideClimateNews. Join online climate communities such as Work on Climate to meet like-minded folks and learn about what they are working on.
Join a climate robotics research project or companyIf you want to contribute to solving climate change more directly, you can join an existing climate-robotics initiative. Climate Change AI is an active community of machine-learning (ML) researchers working on climate solutions. ClimateBase has a large climate-tech job board for those wanting to make a career transition. To discover more relevant projects and as a shameless plug, check out my blog, Nirva Labs, for coverage of climate-robotics founders and researchers. If you’re more of a podcaster, Hardware to Save a Planet interviews people working on hardware solutions for climate change that aren’t limited to robotics.
Start something on your ownIf you’re ready to jump into the deep end, start a company or research project on your own! You can begin by reaching out to climate practitioners and asking them how to scale up the solutions they are working on. Try to fully understand their pain points before starting to build anything. If there’s already a robotics solution for a certain vertical, don’t just give up on it! Reach out to customers who are already using it and ask them how they want to improve it. Also ask customers who haven’t started using it, and understand why. Usually there will be many different customer segments within a single vertical, which means that a better alternative or a differentiated solution will grab the remaining market share.
Climate change is the most pressing issue of our time, and we are running out of time. The Paris Agreement demands that we keep global warming to no more than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F). To achieve that goal, we must reduce our emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. But we are still far from that goal. Meanwhile, the Inflation Reduction Act has provided momentum for scaling up existing climate solutions to get to the carbon-reduction goal.
Roboticists, there’s no better time to work on climate robotics than right now! We have the superpower that has taken us to Mars. Let’s take advantage of this great policy environment and use our skills to accelerate climate solutions to reach net zero in time!
Sherry Chen is the founder of Nirva Labs, an organization that raises awareness about climate robotics solutions and encourages more engineers to join this field. She was also an early employee at Chef Robotics, building robots for repetitive tasks in commercial kitchens. Previously, she has built an award-winning autonomous boat for water-quality monitoring, taught a last-mile-delivery Nuro robot to interact safely with pedestrians, and published a paper on ML-based interactive planning for autonomous vehicles while doing research at the University of Pennsylvania.
The world emits 51 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. To solve the climate crisis, we need to cut this in half by 2030, and get to zero by 2050. For electricity generation, this means the United States alone needs to increase renewable-energy capacities by 10 times over the next 12 years, which roughly translates to a mind-boggling 400,000 more wind turbines and 2.5 billion more solar panels. To accelerate this progress, Congress has recently passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes billions of dollars for clean-energy projects. We will need a lot of workforce to install and maintain these facilities at the front lines, which are not always well suited to humans.
As a roboticist, I see these dull, dirty, and even dangerous tasks as the perfect area for robots. However, there’s a shortage of roboticists tackling climate change, due to a lack of awareness of necessary and urgent applications. After talking with many climate robotics founders for my blog, Nirva Labs, here are my findings on how you can find opportunities to help robots make an impact on climate change.The first robot I built from scratch was SS MAPR, an autonomous boat for water departments to collect multidepth water-quality data. They use this data to monitor river pollution and rein in pollution sources. To this day, it remains the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on. After six months of 80-hour weeks and sleepless nights, SS MAPR was able to finish its maiden voyage with water samples and data collected from the bottom of the Schuylkill River, in Pennsylvania. That was the eureka moment for me: All the prototyping and coding resulted in faster and cheaper access to the data that drives regulatory actions. I want to build more robots that improve the environment we live in.
SS MAPR prepares for its maiden voyage on the Schuylkill River, in Philadelphia.Sherry Chen
Stunned by the rampant wildfires after moving to the Bay Area in 2020, I started Nirva Labs to write about climate robotics opportunities. Surprisingly, many founders I talked with echoed the shortage of roboticists in climate tech. This was disproportionate to the huge potential of robotics for solving climate problems. My personal experience confirmed those observations. At all the robotics events I went to in the Bay Area, one of the biggest robotics hubs in the world, I could barely find anyone working on climate. The investment data backed this up—according to PitchBook, climate robotics accounts for less than 1 percent of total robotics venture funding over the past five years.
Why aren’t there more roboticists working on climate change? After talking to some peers, I realized that from a superficial perspective, climate change doesn’t seem to need robotic inventions—we already have most of the solutions in nonrobotic forms. But that’s exactly why climate change needs robotics to do the repetitive work: to scale up existing solutions so we can get to net zero in time.
Using robots to scale up existing climate solutionsTo understand why robotics is crucial for tackling climate change, we should look to an analogous case: the automotive industry. For a long time, cars were made by humans. In 1925, assembling one Ford Model T required an average assembly speed of 3.76 seconds per part. This was the norm for almost 40 years, before General Motors introduced a robotic arm to assist in the assembly line. Today, assembling a Toyota SUV takes about 2.04 seconds per part, an 84 percent improvement from a century ago—even though the assembly process has exploded in complexity.
This is the sweet spot for robotics—freeing humans from repetitive tasks while increasing efficiency. Climate tech is in a state similar to that of the early automotive industry. Most building blocks of the overall climate solution already exist (for example, solar- and wind-energy generators, electric vehicles, heat pumps) but need to be deployed at scale quickly in order to go from 51 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. By doing what they do best, robots can play a big role in accelerating the fight against climate change by enabling economies of scale.
Finding climate robotics opportunitiesThere are many technically feasible opportunities in climate robotics that can have an impact on the climate, but how do you actually find one? The best way is to deeply learn and understand the life cycle of an existing climate solution and identify how automation can accelerate it. But for any climate solution, it’s important to watch out for its overall climate impact: is it directly mitigating or removing greenhouse gas emissions, helping us adapt to the impacts of climate change, or enhancing our understanding of the climate? The overall impact involves not only the technical solution but also the economic and political forces around it. So it’s important to trace the solution down the entire life cycle and get a full picture of the pros and cons.
Climate robotics opportunities for renewable energyThe renewable-energy sector is a great place to search for climate robotics opportunities. Energy sources like solar and wind are already cost competitive compared with fossil fuel. Robots can help eliminate the bottlenecks that limit their expansion.
Starting from the source of the renewable-energy value chain, robots can help remove the labor bottleneck for installing solar and wind farms. For example, one of the most time-consuming and dangerous tasks in building solar farms is heavy lifting. AES, an energy giant, has developed an automated solar farm construction robot to solve this problem. The robot can automatically install solar panels on pre-installed foundations to free workers from lifting. It is also three times as fast as a human, and the new solar layout can generate twice as much solar energy within the same footprint. This is a great example of how outdoor autonomous navigation and robot manipulator control speeds up the renewable-energy transition.
X Laboratory’s motion-compensation technology helps to boost the number of days that wind turbines can be installed regardless of windy conditions. X Laboratory
Offshore wind-farm construction faces a different challenge, with installations limited from April to November because the high wind conditions in the winter make it challenging for high-precision tasks such as blade installation. X Laboratory, a Dutch company, has developed a motion-compensation technology to keep a crane stable during the blade-installation process, which can increase the wind-speed tolerance and thus increase the installation days to all year round. The team is currently improving the technology to compensate for disturbances from waves, so installation can be done on floating vessels instead of jack-up vessels, which stand on the seabed. This could potentially double the construction speed. This is a creative and effective climate application of robust robot control.
Renewable-energy facilities need routine maintenance to stay efficient. With their rapid expansion over the past decade, there has been a shortage of skilled maintenance technicians. For example, inspecting and repairing onshore wind turbines involves hanging a person 150 meters above the ground, which can be done only by well-trained rope-access technicians. Many wind-farm operators have to hire technicians from out of state at a high cost, which pushes up the overall cost of wind energy.
Many companies have been using automation to solve this problem. Companies like Unleash are using drones to speed up blade inspection, while Aerones has developed a tethered drone supported by a rope system that has a bigger payload and better stability. This expands the task envelope from inspection to cleaning, coating, and simple repairs. Sometimes a creative spin on an existing robot brings a big impact.
Aerones’ tethered drones can assist with maintenance and inspection of wind turbines.Aerones
And there are many more robotics opportunities throughout the renewables value chain. Batteries are an important buffer for renewable energy, which varies throughout the day. However, there is a shortage of critical battery minerals like lithium and cobalt. Companies like Impossible Metals are working on robots to harvest ore nodules from the seabed to alleviate this shortage. On the other end of the battery life cycle, both academia (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and industry (Posh Robotics) have been developing robots to repurpose retired EV batteries, which still have 80 percent storage capacity at the end of their lives and can be used as energy storage for buildings. Robotics speeds up the process and reduces human exposure to toxic chemicals and high voltage levels.
How You Can HelpStay up to date on the climate solutions landscapeFor a bird’s-eye view of the existing solutions, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates and Speed and Scale by John Doerr are both good books to start with. Project Drawdown has also compiled a comprehensive list of existing climate solutions and their estimated impacts. Stay up to date on climate news by following channels like InsideClimateNews. Join online climate communities such as Work on Climate to meet like-minded folks and learn about what they are working on.
Join a climate robotics research project or companyIf you want to contribute to solving climate change more directly, you can join an existing climate-robotics initiative. Climate Change AI is an active community of machine-learning (ML) researchers working on climate solutions. ClimateBase has a large climate-tech job board for those wanting to make a career transition. To discover more relevant projects and as a shameless plug, check out my blog, Nirva Labs, for coverage of climate-robotics founders and researchers. If you’re more of a podcaster, Hardware to Save a Planet interviews people working on hardware solutions for climate change that aren’t limited to robotics.
Start something on your ownIf you’re ready to jump into the deep end, start a company or research project on your own! You can begin by reaching out to climate practitioners and asking them how to scale up the solutions they are working on. Try to fully understand their pain points before starting to build anything. If there’s already a robotics solution for a certain vertical, don’t just give up on it! Reach out to customers who are already using it and ask them how they want to improve it. Also ask customers who haven’t started using it, and understand why. Usually there will be many different customer segments within a single vertical, which means that a better alternative or a differentiated solution will grab the remaining market share.
Climate change is the most pressing issue of our time, and we are running out of time. The Paris Agreement demands that we keep global warming to no more than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F). To achieve that goal, we must reduce our emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. But we are still far from that goal. Meanwhile, the Inflation Reduction Act has provided momentum for scaling up existing climate solutions to get to the carbon-reduction goal.
Roboticists, there’s no better time to work on climate robotics than right now! We have the superpower that has taken us to Mars. Let’s take advantage of this great policy environment and use our skills to accelerate climate solutions to reach net zero in time!
Sherry Chen is the founder of Nirva Labs, an organization that raises awareness about climate robotics solutions and encourages more engineers to join this field. She was also an early employee at Chef Robotics, building robots for repetitive tasks in commercial kitchens. Previously, she has built an award-winning autonomous boat for water-quality monitoring, taught a last-mile-delivery Nuro robot to interact safely with pedestrians, and published a paper on ML-based interactive planning for autonomous vehicles while doing research at the University of Pennsylvania.