ICRA 2011 kicks off in less than two weeks in Shanghai, China.  Unfortunately, I won't be attending -- I'll have to wait to see y'all at IROS 2011 in San Francisco come September.  However, I was browsing through the program and it looks like there are going to be a lot of great talks! A few that caught my eye: Morgan Quigley's low-cost 7 degree-of-freedom (7-DoF) series elastic actuator (SEA) arm for sub-$5k, Aaron Dollar's helicopter-mounted shape deposition manufacturing (SDM) hand,  and Rollin' Justin's fast reflexes to catch flying (tossed) balls... and these are just the talks that have videos posted online already (embedded below).  Eventually I'll get around to writing about all this cool research (after finishing my dissertation in a few months!) -- but for the time being, here's a quick scatter-shot overview.

KUKA has developed an impressive array of omnidirectional robot platforms: OmniMove, OmniRob, and youBot. A new video on the youBot Store shows how an OmniMove holonomic base (containing eight mecanum wheels) can be transformed into a seriously heavy-lifting mobile manipulator through the addition of a huge Titan robot arm, which has been called the "world's strongest robot arm" and is capable of lifting 1000 kg.  The video (embedded below) shows this latest platform towering over the smaller youBot platform. I wonder if this new platform would qualify for BattleBots...?  It would make for a fun exposition match!

Two weeks ago, Engadget / CrunchGear posted videos of RAPUDA (Robotic Arm for Persons with Upper limb DisAbilities) from AIST's Intelligent Systems Research Institute -- a wheelchair-mounted, light-weight robot arm with a prominent telescoping link that was demonstrated grasping a cup from a table, lifting the cup for drinking, and grasping an object from the floor via teleoperation (video embedded below).  Given my proclivity for clever mechanisms, I wanted details about the telescoping link, specifically to determine how it compares to the Geosystems Situational Awareness Mast (aka Zippermast).  Well, I found what I was looking for: a Japanese patent application for "Linearly Moving Extendable Mechanism and Robot Arm Equipped with Linearly Moving Extendable Mechanism."  Basically, the telescoping segment consists of a series of small interlocking modules that are expelled (or reeled-in) through the "shoulder" link.  Check out the pictures -- cool stuff!

FastCompany spotted a new version of HERB (Home Exploring Robot Butler) at the CMU Quality of Life Technology Center.  HERB is a joint effort between Intel Research's Personal Robotics Program and Carnegie Mellon University.  The new version sports two Barrett WAM arms on a Segway RMP mobile base and has a very distinctive rotating (instead of tilting) planar laser rangefinder.  The new HERB certainly has a unique design -- be sure to check out the photos and video below where HERB grasps objects from a table.

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.

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.

Meka Robotics is a San Francisco robotics startup founded by MIT roboticists Aaron Edsinger and Jeff Weber, of Domo fame.  They have produced some pretty amazing products in the last few years, including the humanoid robot Simon that was recently featured on Hizook.  As I'm somewhat familiar with these arms and hands, I'd like to share some more detailed information, including new videos of the torso and a more detailed look at the anthropomorphic hands.  In particular, it is worth noting that all motors on the 7-DOF arms and 4-DOF hands employ series-elastic actuators (SEAs), a technology that offers natural compliance and provides torque measurements at each joint -- two very useful qualities for robots interacting directly with people.  Be sure to read on for videos and many pictures.   Updated Oct. 19th 2009:  exclusive photos, product data sheets, and new videos added.

The good folks at the AI and Robotics Blog have posted an entertaining video of a Kuka Light-Weight Robot (LWR) arm climbing a ladder -- an impressive feat for such a large arm.  Those who read Hizook will recognize these arms as descendants of the DLR-III lightweight arms (featured frequently), also with a 1:1 mass-payload ratio, that have been employed on the Justin research platform.  According to the AI and Robotics Blog posting, the arms are now available for purchase, though they still do not appear to be listed as an "available product" on Kuka's website.  However, Kuka is certainly moving forward with these arms -- they have been in numerous demonstrations at recent trade shows; for example, I saw them featured at IROS 2008, and they recently appeared atop Kuka's new mobile manipulator, the OmniRob robot.  Check out the video below.

Dr. Andrea Thomaz of Georgia Tech's Socially Intelligent Machines Lab was recently awarded the prestigious "MIT Tech Review 2009 Young Innovators Under 35", an honor shared with last year's robotics recipient, Andrew Ng.  Simultaneous to this fantastic news, Andrea's lab unveiled an amazing new robot named Simon (see photos and videos below).  Simon features an articulated torso, dual 7-DOF arms, and anthropomorphic hands from Meka Robotics along with an expressive head designed at Georgia Tech.  Simon is designed to study human-robot interaction from a social learning vantage, such as learning by demonstration and human-robot collaboration.  I'm very enthralled for Andrea, and I'm proud to have taken her graduate research course on human-robot interaction while at Georgia Tech. 

While perusing through Kuka's 2008 Annual Report, it became evident that the robotics giant is making a serious foray into mobile manipulation with its OmniRob concept robot (photos and videos below).  This new robot sports a omnidirectional mobile platform based on mecanum wheels, a Kuka lightweight arm, and what appear to be dual SICK LMS100 laser range finders to provide 360° lidar coverage.  Between Kuka's "toy" educational platform (covered by Hizook in October) and this more advanced offering, it is clear that Kuka is highly invested / interested in the future of mobile manipulation.  With Kuka's classic expertise in robot arms, combined with competence in omnidirectional systems via their OmniMove industrial application line, Kuka will surely be a significant force in the exciting field of mobile manipulation.

While most (semi)autonomous mobile manipulators employ expensive articulated arms with grippers (6 or more DOF), the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, the same folks who made EL-E, are also examining low-complexity end effectors modelled off of dustpans and kitchen turners for non-prehensile grasping of isolated objects from the floor.  When mounted on an iRobot Create (Roomba), the system's performance was impressive; it successfully grasped ~95% of the 34 test objects across numerous orientations / configurations and four different surfaces -- an impressive feat of robustness given that the end effector is a single under-actuated "sweeper" (1 DOF) working in tandem with a planar wedge, the whole system operates via open loop control, and the objects were quite varied (from small individual pills to large containers, and from deformable textiles to rigid bottles).  This system is slated to appear at ICRA 2009 in Kobe, Japan in the next few days and is documented in a paper entitled "1000 Trials: An Empirically Validated End Effector that Robustly Grasps Objects from the Floor" (of which I am a coauthor).  Read further for videos and additional discussion.

During the Spring 2007 semester, several friends (and labmates) took a course at Georgia Tech on mobile manipulation. This was no ordinary class... the final exam's assignment was to use a Segway base with KUKA arm to fetch a cup of coffee!  There are a ton of reasons that this is interesting, from mobility, navigation, perception, manipulation, etc. However, the most impressive thing is that each group used different software to complete the task. One team used MS Robotics Studio, another used Player/Stage on Linux, and another used a functional language called OCaml on Mac.

Back in November of 2007, I saw a presentation by Professor Siciliano from University of Naples where he briefly mentioned (and had a video) of a very cool humanoid robot named Justin.  I've seen a lot more of DLR-III lightweight arms now that DLR and Kuka are working together to push them out into industry; though I must admit that I like Justin's blue arms compared to the characteristic Kuka-orange.  Perhaps the most impressive aspect of these arms is that each has a power-to-weight ratio greater than unity.  This, combined with some very capable DLR-II Hands make Justin an impressive bi-manual research platform.