This week KUKA Robotics is demonstrating their latest product offering at the Automatica conference in Munich: the youBot robot.  YouBot is a mobile manipulating robot with a 5DOF arm coupled to a mecanum omnidirectional base -- essentially the same product that Hizook predicted when the individual components were being demonstrated at IROS 2008.  KUKA will start delivery in November for Germany (March for the US), and the robot will cost approx $24,000 USD (less with educational discounts), and components will be available separately.  The youBot looks to be a solid robot platform and is not encumbered by the large control boxes characteristic of some larger KUKA arms -- a few photos and videos are embedded below.

At Willow Garage's week-long PR2 training workshop, each of the eleven recipient institutions gave a 15-20 minute talk highlighting their planned research activities on the PR2.  On Monday, with a little help from yours truly, the first beta-site spotlight (of Georgia Tech) was posted on the WG blog -- complete with recorded video from the training workshop talk by Prof. Charlie Kemp (of Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab).  Today, the spotlight for UC Berkeley (with video) followed.  These spotlights and recorded talks are a treasure trove of insights into work being performed at several top robotics research labs.  They are definitely worth reading / watching!  As as they come online, I'll embed the videos below and include links to Willow's thorough blog posts.  [Warning: many embedded videos below.]

The curious robotic creation pictured below is called the Roomba QuadDrive, and hails from the University of Bonn's Autonomous Intelligent Systems Lab (NimbRo@Home).   The Roomba QuadDrive is an omnidirectional mobile robot base of the powered caster variety with one obvious (whimsical) characteristic:  it uses four IRobot Roomba 530s as the drive motors, each paired with a Robotis Dynamixel RX-64 servo for steering!  Another of the lab's robots, named Robotinho, surfed atop the QuadDrive base when competing in the 2009 RoboCup@Home competition and when it gave tours of the Deutsches Museum in Bonn -- a short clip of which is embedded below.

The Boston Globe has unearthed another solid player in the remote presence (sometimes referred to as mobile telepresence or mobile videoconferencing) game. This time, it is the Vgo (pronounced Vee-Go) robot from Vgo Communications. Apparently Vgo Communications was founded in 2007 by Tim Root and has upwards of $8M in venture capital funding. The Vgo robot is pretty sleek with a nice cosmetic shell, though it seems a bit vertically challenged. Its target price-point is somewhere around $5000, with a required $1200 annual support contract. This comes just days after Anybots made their QB robot announcements ($15,000 ea.) and after some high-profile Willow Garage Texai events. A few other major players have been relatively quiet as of late, such as InTouch Health and Giraff Technologies (formerly HeadThere).

On Wednesday night, midway through a week-long PR2 training workshop, Willow Garage held a press conference and party celebrating the launch of the PR2 Beta Program, essentially signifying the completion of their Milestone 4.  The night featured speeches by Willow Garage founder (Scott Hassan), CEO (Steve Cousins), and Personal Robotics Program co-founders (Keenan Wyrobek and Eric Berger).  Eleven PR2 robots, destined for recipient robotics institutions around the world, made dramatic entrances before performing an impressive 11-robot coordinated dance (see video below).  I was privileged to attend the event as both a workshop participant and as a Hizook "press" representative, providing access to the press conference where I met other elite robotics bloggers, such as Norri Kageki (GetRobo), Evan Ackerman (BotJunkie), and Erico Guizzo (IEEE Spectrum Automation Blog).  The event was fun, and definitely strengthened my impression that the personal robotics revolution is near.  Updated June 2^nd 2010:  The official Willow Garage mashup from the "PR2 Graduation Party" has been posted (embedded below).

Last week Willow Garage kicked off its official PR2 Beta Robot Workshop, where approximately 50 robotics researchers from the 11 PR2 recipient institutions gathered to become familiar with ROS on the PR2, hack on the robot alongside Willow personnel, and have plenty of stimulating robotics discussions.    Attending as a grad student in Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab, I had a front-row seat to this enjoyable but grueling event.  I'll give my high-level day-to-day overview of the week (below), which included the "PR2 Launch Party" on Thursday night that featured many prominent folks from Silicon Valley (more detailed coverage).  As an aside, I was proud to hear that so many robotics professionals at the event read and enjoy Hizook -- be sure to contribute your photos and impressions in the comments.

On Thursday, Meka Robotics uploaded a video showing off their latest "coming soon" product, the G1 robot gripper.  While the price and specs are still unknown, the patent-pending parallel-jaw design with independent finger actuation looks interesting -- a great addition to their product lineup.  Be sure to check out the video embedded below. 

I finally took a few minutes to watch a tear-down of the Roomba 4000 Series vacuum cleaner by Dino Segovis of DinoFab.com.  The 20-minute two-part video (embedded below) provides a pretty solid look at the design considerations that went into making the Roomba both robust and low-cost.  While the sensors and motherboard are definitely interesting, the motors are the most intriguing to me -- they seem to be separately fabricated modules with a small DC motor coupled to a planetary gearhead via a belt drive.   It is also striking just how much gunk (hair, dust, etc.) builds up inside every nook and cranny of the robot.  Definitely a hacker-friendly robot that offers plenty of lessons to people interested in designing commercial robots -- almost worth buying one just to look at first-hand.

At IROS 2009, IRobot demonstrated an interesting form of locomotion dubbed "particle jamming skin" (to create what became known as the "blob bot").  The robot was creepy, but the concept was interesting.  In a recently available TEDMED 2009 talk (embedded below), IRobot CEO Colin Angle describes a unique particle jamming end effector (robot hand) for manipulation.  By selectively inflating or deflating, the particle jamming end effector can change from a liquid-like state to ooze around a target object and then harden into a solid-like state to grasp or pickup the object.  Colin shows a video of a PackBot with particle jamming end effector picking up medication, keys, and a (dummy) patient's arm.  He also does a live demonstration using a hand-held particle jamming system.  Be sure to check out the video and stills below -- they will help you understand this bizarre (but compelling) robot hand.

Back in October 2009, Colin Angle spoke at TEDMED 2009.  It was a big announcement: IRobot was launching a new healthcare robotics business unit to be led by Tod Loofbourrow.  Their ambitious goal:  add 1 million years to users' lifetimes through robotic assistance.  Some good synopses of the talk were posted, but videos of the event were elusive... until now.  Below you can find the full video of Colin's talk and some points that I think are particularly poignant.

Today Willow Garage announced that eleven (rather than the original ten anticipated) PR2 Beta robots, with a total value of over $4.4M, will be loaned out to academic and research institutions worldwide to develop a slew of impressive capabilities over the next two years.  The recipients include 7 US-based institutions, 3 European, and 1 Asian.  The final list is a panoply of robotics specialists:  University of Freiburg (Germany), Bosch, Georgia Tech, KU Leuven (Belgium), MIT, Stanford, TU Munich (Germany), UC Berkeley, U Penn, USC, and University of Tokyo (Japan) -- full details can be found in the Willow Garage press release.  It is difficult to overstate the importance of this event in the grand history of robotics...  Let me try to explain.

Phillip Torrone (senior editor of Make Magazine) and Limor Fried (aka Lady Ada), both of AdaFruit Industries, gave a talk at O'Reilly's Foo Camp East 2010 that unveiled the financials of two robotics-related open hardware projects.  First, DIYDrones -- founded by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson and makers of open hardware UAV components like autopilots and IMUs  -- is approaching $1M in revenue (est. 2010).  Second, MakerBot -- an open hardware 3D printer and purveyors of an online 3D design repository called Thingiverse -- has surpassed $1M in revenue.  Looks like open hardware is really starting to gain momentum.

Robotiq is a new Canadian startup spun-out of the Laval University Robotics Lab and founded by Samuel Bouchard, Vincent Duchaine and Jean-Philippe Jobin.  Their first product is a very cool looking three-fingered robot hand called the "Adaptive Gripper."  It is comprised of three under-actuated fingers, two of which can change their position and orientation to support a variety of grasp configurations -- very similar in principle to the Barrett Hand and Schunk SDH Hand.  The Adaptive Gripper's prominent finger linkages lead to a rather beautiful mechanical motion, as seen in the grasping videos (below).  I would imagine the mechanical linkages also offer additional robustness compared to under-actuated cable-driven competitors and cost advantages over fully-actuated competitors.  Unfortunately, its price is still an unknown -- perhaps someone attending ICRA 2010 in Alaska can stop by their booth and inquire...?

IRobot posted amazing first-quarter revenue, driving the stock price up 30% in one day to a new 52-week high.  The new stock price is hovering right at $20 per share, up 96% from its late-July low of $10.21 per share.  I'm glad too see such a positive turn around, though it is somewhat bittersweet -- I had been considering a purchase of IRBT shares ever since a prescient analysis by "Robot Stock News" in early December, but lacked funds to make the plunge.  I guess meager graduate student salaries are not conducive to investing.

This new robot blimp, powered by electroactive polymers (EAPs), comes from the Swiss Federal Labs for Materials Testing and Research (EMPA). It reminds me of the Festo Air Ray, and definitely ranks up there with other cool EAP robots like the Artificial Muscle EPAM variants previously discussed on Hizook.  Be sure to check out the video.

[We received the following note from Sonia Chernova @ MIT Media Lab]  The Personal Robots group at the MIT Media Lab has released an online game designed to make robots smarter!  Mars Escape is a two-player online game in which each player can take on the role of an astronaut or a robot on Mars.  The players must work together to complete their mission before oxygen supplies run out.

Depth cameras go by many names: ranging camera, flash lidar, time-of-flight (ToF) camera, and RGB-D camera.  The underlying sensing mechanisms are equally varied: range-gated ToF, RF-modulated ToF, pulsed-light ToF, and projected-light stereo.  The commonality is that all provide traditional (sometimes color) images and depth information for each pixel (depth images) at framerate.  Existing commercial offerings, such as the Swiss Ranger SR4000 and PMD Tech products, currently cost ~$10,000.   Thus, I'm extremely excited by Dieter Fox's recent statement about a sub-$100 depth camera that could hit stores later this year!  Dr. Fox has already leveraged a similar (this?) sensor to build cool 3D SLAM maps akin to Google Street View indoors -- see videos below.  Is Dr. Fox's employer (Intel) building depth cameras?  Is this a new PrimeSense offering?  Or could it hail from fellow Seattle powerhouse, Microsoft, who not long ago purchased 3DV Systems (purveyor of ToF cameras) and who plans to release Project Natal (rumored to be projected stereo) later this year for the XBox 360?  I'd love details, but am intrigued regardless!  Updated March 31st 2010:  Big news -- PrimeSense is supplying the 3D sensing technology to Project Natal for the XBox 360!  Now I'm almost certain this is the sensor referred to by Dieter Fox.

This new humanoid robot named "Cody" comes from Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab (to which I belong).  Cody is composed of a Segway RMP 50 Omni mobile base, 1-DoF vertical linear actuator, and a pair of 7-DoF Meka Arms with series elastic actuators (the same as Simon).  This mobile manipulator has shown some pretty impressive capabilities.  It can open doors, drawers, and cabinets using equilibrium point controllers developed by Advait Jain and Prof. Charlie Kemp.  It also has a nice direct physical interface (touching interface) to reposition the robot that was developed by Tiffany Chen and Prof. Charlie Kemp. Much of the code controlling this robot is open-source and has ROS (Robot Operating System) interfaces.  Be sure to check out the videos and photos below.

Professional and hobbyist roboticists alike are snapping up Robotis Dynamixel Servos.  These "smart" servos serve an important niche between $30 hobby servos and super-expensive harmonic drive servos.  They sport torques ranging from 12 kg·cm to 106 kg·cm, and even more when doubled-up.  Most of my experience is with the RX-28 and RX-64 variants, which have 300° swing, 10-bit position sensing resolution, (roughly) 8-bit position control, force/torque sensing, available compliance mode, and can daisy-chain more than 250 servos.  At Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab, we use dozens of these servos.  I recently invested a decent amount of time overhauling our open-source (Python) control software, adding (among other things) thread-safe operation and ROS (Robot Operating System) compatibility.  In this post, I'll do a brief overview of the Robotis Dynamixel offerings, look at a number of impressive applications where they are utilized, share pictures of a servo's disassembly, and give a brief tutorial using the new (awesome) open-source software libraries.

Colleague and labmate, Tiffany Chen, pointed out an interesting new robot named "MeBot" from MIT's Personal Robotics Group.  Later this week, MeBot will be presented at the conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2010) in Osaka, Japan.  The associated paper, "MeBot: A Robotic Platform for Socially Embodied Presence," has been nominated for best paper.  In a nutshell, MeBot is a semi-autonomous robotic avatar that provides rich, remote interaction by conveying non-verbal channels of social communication in addition to video, something that is not provided by existing phone and video conferencing.  The expressiveness of MeBot is impressive.  It reminds me of the (now well-known) CrabFu Swashbot, but ups the ante by including video capabilities.  Be sure to check out the videos and photos below to see what I mean.

This article is an illustrated summary of a recent paper we presented at CVPR 2009.  We leverage some of the linear properties of optical flow fields to develop a method that automatically learns the relationship between camera motion and optical flow from data.  The method can handle arbitrary imaging systems including very severe distortion, curved mirrors, and multiple cameras.  Using this method, a robot can estimate it's motion in real time from video while detecting "motion anomalies" such as nearby or moving objects.

Back in 2007 and 2008, funding agencies had a pretty hefty interest in robots with amoeba-like locomotion, also known as whole-skin locomotion (WSL), blob 'bots, or Chembots.  NSF awarded $400k to Dr. Dennis Hong of Virginia Tech's RoMeLa Lab and DARPA awarded $3.3M to iRobot to develop such robots.  Now, most people are familiar with iRobot's jamming skin robot announced at IROS 2009 (photos / videos below).  However, I would like to share with you the equally-clever and interesting work of Dr. Hong, including a new whole-skin locomotion robot called ChIMERA: "Chemically Induced Motion Everting Robotic Amoeba" that was unveiled at a recent TEDxNASA event.  Dr. Hong's robots resemble those slippery water-snake toys that are incredibly difficult to grasp, with silicone skin (flexible but rugged exterior) and water or gel inside (soft interior).  Read on to learn more!

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are no longer relegated to military and police forces.  Amateurs and hobbyists, working in close-knit online communities, are fusing old RC airplane concepts with modern technology to create UAVs that rival commercial offerings.  Recent efforts suggest that an amateur UAV, complete with on-board cameras, wireless video downlinks, operator heads-up display, autonomous waypoint navigation / autopilot control, and ground tracking stations can all be had for less than $2,000 (read on for details)!  Unfortunately, the FAA (aviation regulatory body in the United States) already treats commercial UAVs as regular planes, requiring aircraft registration and 60 day pre-flight plans.  While the regulations for hobbyists seem to be more lax, I personally believe the FAA should embrace amateur UAV builders in the same way that the FCC embraced ham radio operators of yesteryear.

Well, it's official.  Willow Garage CEO Steve Cousins just announced to the Robotics-Worldwide mailing list that Willow intends to give away 10 PR2 robots.  These are some amazingly impressive robots, costing several hundred thousand dollars each.  Willow's PR2 robots and open-source Robot Operating System (ROS) have been widely acclaimed by news organizations such as the New York Times, Popular Science, Hizook, and pretty much everyone else.  This should be an interesting year for Willow Garage.  The full Robotics-Worldwide announcement is below, and the Willow Garage Call for Proposals (CFP) can be found here.  Updated Jan 21st 2010: Included some new (professional) photos of the finished PR2.

I would like to share a piece of work that I think is awesome on so many levels.  First, it involves the weakly electric knifefish: a curious creature that maneuvers via ribbon-finned propulsion (a marvel of fluid dynamics) and possesses an uncommon sensing modality in the form of electric field sensing (essentially electrostatic / capacitive sensing).  Second, the work models the fish as a dynamic system through its measured frequency response expressed in Bode plots, a process familiar to pretty much any type of engineer.  You read that right, they made Bode plots of a fish -- how cool is that!?  Be sure to check out the videos and photos below.