Daily Archives: July 11, 2017

Intuition Robotics, maker of the ElliQ robotic elder care assistant, and opened an office in San Francisco. As it looks to grow staff and ramp up testingof the product, the company has raised another $14 million, this time from Toyota Research Institute (TRI).

ElliQ, which the company likes to call an active aging companion, ismade up of an interactive robot attached to a tablet, and is designed to help older adults age in place. The robot was built to keep the elderly engaged, active, and connected to the outside world, first byallowing families to video chat with older relatives and second by acting as a companion to suggest activities and remind elderly users to take their medicine.

Intuition Robotics recently entered the initial testing phase of the companion robot with users in the Bay Area, and is actively hiring a team there. With those plans underway, the company was looking to add more funding to its war chest and add some expertise along the way because, well, hardware is hard.

With the Toyota Research Institute investment, the company got both. According toIntuition Robotics CEO Dor Skuler, Toyota approached the robotics company after learning what it was working on and immediately provided value by helping to replace some of the motors in the ElliQ prototype.

At this stage of the product, we do need help, and its very refreshing to be approached by an investor that has studied this space and has some expertise, Skuler told me.

The new funding follows$6 million that Intuition Robotics raised from investors that include Roomba maker iRobot, Terra Venture Partners, Bloomberg Beta and Maniv Mobility. The company also raised money through crowdfunding platform OurCrowd.

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Intuition Robotics raises another $14 million, this time from Toyota ... - TechCrunch

Next week TechCrunch is hosting its first ever one-day event centered around robotics. Called TC Sessions: Robotics, there are still a few general admission tickets left which grant the holder access to the conference, workshops, and networking events. Plus there are going to be robots as far as the eye can see. We hope you can make it and heres why.

Join us next Monday, July 17, and get your ticket now before Kresges limited seating is sold out.

Were looking for a few great volunteers to help us make TC Sessions: Robotics happen. If youd like to get some practical experience working at events as well as come to the event for free, let us know byfilling out this form by Thursday, July 13.

9:00 am 9:05 am Opening Remarks from Matthew Panzarino

9:05 am 9:25 am Whats Next at MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Daniela Rus (MIT CSAIL)

9:25 am 9:50 am Is Venture Ready for Robotics? with Manish Kothari (SRI), Josh Wolfe (Lux Capital) and Helen Zelman (Lemnos)

9:50 am 10:10 am The Future of Industrial Robotics with Sami Atiya (ABB)

10:10 am 10:35 am Collaborative Robots At Work with Clara Vu (VEO), Jerome Dubois (6 River Systems) and Holly Yanco (UMass Lowell)

10:30 am 11:15 am WORKSHOP: Fresh Out of the MIT Lab with Robert Katzschmann, Claudia Perez DArpino and Andrew Spielberg

10:35 am 10:55 am Coffee Break

10:55 am 11:20 am Robots, AI and Humanity with David Barrett (Olin), David Edelman (MIT) and Dr. Brian Pierce (DARPA)

11:20 am 11:45 am Building A Robotics Startup from Angel to Exit with Helen Greiner (CyPhy Works), Andy Wheeler (GV) and Elaine Chen (Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship)

11:45 am 12:05 pm Imagineering Disney Robotics with Martin Buehler (Disney Imagineering)

12:15 pm 1:00 pm WORKSHOP: Educating the Next Generation of Roboticists with David Barrett (Olin College), Ryan Keenan (Udacity), and Dr. Robert McMahan (Kettering University)

1:00 pm 1:20 pm Robots at Amazon with Tye Brady (Amazon Robotics)

1:20 pm 1:55 pm Building The Robot Brain with Heather Ames (Neurala), Brian Gerkey (Open Robotics) and Deepu Talla (Nvidia)

1:55 pm 2:20 pm When Robots Fly with Buddy Michini (Airware), Andreas Raptopoulos (Matternet) and Jan Stumpf (Intel)

2:20 pm 2:40 pm Bringing Robots Home with Colin Angle (iRobot)

2:40 pm 2:50 pm Demo with Carl Vause (Soft Robotics)

2:50 pm 3:00 pm Demo with David Perry (Harvard University SEAS)

3:05 pm 3:25 pm Coffee Break

3:15 pm 4:00 pm WORKSHOP: Getting the Most Out of DARPA with Dr. Brian Pierce

3:35 pm 4:15 pm Robotics Startup Pitch-off

Contestants: CP Robotics, Hand4Help, Tangible Media Group and Franklin Robotics // Judges: Jeremy Conrad (Lemnos Labs), Helen Greiner (CyPhy Works), Daniel Theobald (Vecna Technologies) andMelonee Wise (Fetch Robotics).

4:15 pm 4:35 pm The Age Of The Household Robot with Gill Pratt (Toyota Research Institute)

4:35 pm 4:55 pm Fireside Chat with Rodney Brooks (Rethink Robotics)

4:55 pm 5:05 pm Demo with Bruce Welty (Locus Robotics)

5:05 pm 5:15 pm Demo with Sangbae Kim (MIT Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory)

5:15 pm 5:20pm Wrap Up

5:20 pm 7:00 pm Reception

DARPA The mission of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is to prevent and create strategic surprise by developing breakthrough technologies for national security. The agencys project-oriented approach to science and engineering, however, is different both in approach and execution from other U.S. governmental funding agencies. In this workshop, DARPA leadership will discuss the Agencys vision and goals, provide overviews of each of the organizations technical offices, in addition to an explanation of the mechanics of working with DARPA. The objective of the workshop is to elicit help in fomenting institutional evolution in Americas broader science and technology ecosystem that is needed to better and more rapidly respond to future challenges.

MIT CSAIL MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is tasked with researching activities around the bleeding edge of technology. Attendees of this workshop will get an insiders look at some of the hottest projects being developed in CSAILs labs and engineering bays. Robert Katzschmann will present Soft Robotics and the teams creative approach to allowing robots to manipulate objects. Claudia Perez DArpinos presentation will demonstrate how robots can learn from a single demo and Andrew Spielberg will explain a novel process to create and fabricate robots.

Building Roboticists David Barrett, a professor of mechanical engineering at Olin College, Ryan Keenan, curriculum lead for Udacity, and Dr. Robert McMahan, President of Kettering University will lead a workshop discussing their views on the best way to train the next generation of roboticists. Each of these educators leads vastly different programs, but the aim is universal: to train the next generation of globally competitive engineers. Its important that these students learn through hands-on experience how to not only write code, but deploy code in a viable manner that results in a sustainable product.

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Five reasons to attend TC Sessions: Robotics next week at MIT ... - TechCrunch

Image: NASA SRC In NASA's Space Robotics Challenge, participants had to command a virtual Valkyrie robot to perform a series of repair tasks in a simulated Mars base hit by a dust storm.

NASAs Space Robotics Challenge (SRC) took place last month, full of virtual Valkyries wandering around a virtual Mars base trying to fix virtual stuff. Anyone was allowed to participate, and since the virtual nature of the competition means there was no need for big expensive robots that mostly didnt fall over, anyone actually could (and did) participate. Of the 93 teams initially signed up to compete, NASA selected 20 finalist teams based on their performance completing some tasks in the Gazebo 3D robot simulator, and each of those finalists had to program a Valkyrie humanoid to complete a repair mission on a simulated Mars base.

The winner of the SRC was team Coordinated Robotics, which also was the only team to manage a perfect run with 100 percent task completion, taking home theUS $125,000top prize plus a$50,000 perfect run bonus. Team may be a little bit of a misnomer, though, since Coordinated Robotics consists entirely of one dude: Kevin Knoedler. We spoke with Kevin about his epic win, and also checked in with Nate Koenig from Open Robotics, which leads the development of Gazebo and helped organize the SRC,to get more info on the competition, along withfootage of all the bestouttakes.

The SRC was very similar to the VRC (the qualifier for the DARPA Robotics Challenge), in that all of the teams competed by running their code in a Gazebo virtual environment. The tasks themselves were somewhat inspired by The Martian,Open Robotics CTO Nate Koenig told us. Valkyrie is on Mars, preparing the way for human settlement, and a dust storm comes. Post dust storm, Val has to align a communications dish, repair a solar array, and locate and fix a leak in the habitat. Here are some highlights from the competition:

The competition overall went pretty smoothly, says Koenig. A unique aspect of the SRC, as opposed to the VRC, is that we were emphasizing sequential completion of tasks. You get more points for completing more tasks in order without having Valkyrie fall or require a reset, so the more reliable you are in terms of walking and manipulating, the better youll do.

As with the DRC, the time limits on the tasks were set such that teams were heavily encouraged to use as much autonomy as possible. And it sounds like most of them did; only a few timed out. Making things even more challenging were severe restrictions on bandwidth coupled with latency designed to emulate (to some extent) what it would be like trying to teleoperate a robot somewhere out in space, as Koenig explains:

Network latency and bandwidth limitations were more severe than the VRC. We wanted to simulate something closer to what you might experience with a round trip delay to Mars, but that would have been too extreme, so we toned it down to a maximum of 20 seconds delay. Some of the tasks had bandwidth limits of 380 bits/second, and if you look at those numbers, that essentially kills TCP.

People had to get creative, and we did see some unique things: one person ran an IRC server and client to pass information, and some other people used just straight text-based console messages, getting no visualized data, which was pretty awesome: It was like reading The Matrix. One team [Team Xion] ran completely autonomously: They just deployed their code and hit go, and they were able to complete a lot of the tasks, which was impressive.

Koenig said he and his colleagues werent expecting any of the teams tocomplete all of the tasks in sequence.But Kevin proved us wrong, he added.And he was the only team that was able to perform that feat.

Kevin is, of course, Kevin Knoedler, who is the entirety of Team Coordinated Robotics. As Nate pointed out, Kevin managed to complete all of the Space Robotics Challenge flawlesslyin a row, which is pretty amazing. We spoke with Kevin over email to learn more about how he pulled it off.

IEEE Spectrum: Whats your background, and what made you decide to enter the SRC by yourself?

Kevin Knoedler: After graduating from MIT I worked as an engineer and engineering manager at Teradyne. I left in 2007 to be a stay-at-home dad. Both during my time at Teradyne and in my current role as a stay-at-home dad, I have continued to be involved in various contestsRobot Wars, Battlebots, the three DARPA autonomous vehicle grand challenges, and the DRC. The SRC looked challenging and fun, so I signed up to compete in it.

I was busy coaching two soccer teams when the qualification round started (fall 2016), and I knew I would be busy coaching track and Odyssey of the Mind when the finals started (early 2017). It is usually key to contribute and coordinate with teams early in the project cycle. Since I would be busy with other thingsduring those key times, I decided to do it alone to avoid frustration for myself and any team I worked with. Working with teams is generally a better choice as more people have more creative ideas. I have worked with teams on all of the previous contests.

How much autonomy did your strategy rely on?

I approached the design for the contest assuming I would always have the maximum time delay, so the robot needed to do shorter tasks on its own. Even without the design work, the up to 20-second delay was not a major problem given that the allowed time was in the hours. My perception code was not as reliable and accurate as I would like, so I focused on the robot doing the planning and execution. It was mostly supervised autonomy with human perception help.

You sent us a video of one of your runs [below]. Can you take us through it?

The video is a short third-person view of the robot completing the three tasks. The first is turning handles to align the antenna. The second task shows the robot removing a solar panel from the trailer, placing it on a table, and plugging in a cable. The final task is climbing the stairs, opening the habitat door, using a tool to locate the leak, and then another tool to fix the leak. One of the fun parts for me was when the robot would find the leak. There was a lot of area to be covered, some of which was partially obstructed, which made it exciting to actually find the leak each run.

The leak was found by the robot doing sweeps up and down and using torso rotation to minimize the amount of walking necessary. As the robot looked for the leak it kept track of the search area as either un-searched, clear, or leaky. That information was displayed to the operator via an interactive marker in Rviz [a 3D visualition tool for ROS] to make it easy to see what had been searched, and when the leak was found, easy to visualize.

What was the trickiest part for you?

I would say the most challenging part was the manipulation and use of tools. Getting a good grasp on the tool and then having the robot use the tools as an extension of the robot were hard to do consistently. I created a scenario in Gazebo where the robot started right at the tools with nothing else around. That allowed testing of picking up the tools from various starting positions and putting them down over and over.

An interesting story from the contest: Sometimes real hardware gets stuck and has to be pushed to get it moving again, and the simulated [Valkyrie robot]in Gazebo also had this behavior. [Open Robotics calledthat an interesting emergent behavior that wasnt programmed in deliberately.]It was possible for the robots thumb to get stuck and no longer respond to commands. That happened to me during the contest on my third run. But, much like in real life, I was able to push the thumb against the table to get it unstuck and moving again to be able to complete the tasks.

What kinds of things are easier in simulation than they are in real life?

Everything is easier in simulation. It is not dramatically easier, but you can solve 90 percent of the problems in simulation. The main thingthat makes simulation easier is the hardware reliabilitythe simulation hardware doesnt break like real hardware frequently does. You can also try riskier experiments. A falling humanoid robot in Gazebo does not cost $100,000 to repair and cause a multi-week delay. The other big advantage to simulation is that one person can run one or multiple tests simultaneously. With a real robot it generally takes multiple people to run a single test.

If NASA put a real Valkyrie inside of a physical mock-up of a Mars base and asked you to complete the same set of tasks, how do you think youd do?

The robot should be able to complete the tasks after some initial testing to identify and fix differences between simulation and hardware. I had a layered approach where I could fall back to lower level control if the primary method did not succeed. There always seem to be enough differences between simulation and real hardware that some adaptations are needed for success. But, given some testing and adaptations, I do think it would be a success!

After participating in the DRC and now the SRC, how do you feel about the potential for humanoid robots to be realistically useful in disaster areas or planetary exploration?

After the DRC and SRC we are getting closer to be able to use humanoid robots in disaster areas on earth and for planetary exploration. The main challenges I see on earth are making the hardware robust, handling falls, and being able to do manipulation in difficult situations (crawling, obstructed or constricted working environments, situations requiring an arm for support, etc.). In space there are the same challenges plus the distances require giving the robot more perception and autonomy.

Kevin made sure to remind us to thank NASA, Space Center Houston, Nine Sigma, Open Robotics, and IHMC on his behalf, which were more than happy to do, because were also constantly wanting to thank them for what theyve all done for robotics.

Oh, and before we forget: outtakes!

[ SRC ] via [ Gazebo ]

IEEE Spectrums award-winning robotics blog, featuring news, articles, and videos on robots, humanoids, drones, automation, artificial intelligence, and more. Contact us:e.guizzo@ieee.org

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How a One-Man Team from California Won NASA's Space Robotics ... - IEEE Spectrum

July 11, 2017 On a hot and breezy June day in Austin, parents, friends, brothers and sisters navigated through main campus at The University of Texas at Austin and helped carry luggage for the new arrivals to their dorm rooms. Thirty-four high school students from mostly low-income Title I schools in Central Texas, some from as far away as Houston, said good-bye to their families.

The students came for a different kind of summer camp, where for one week they became part of a science team that used computer programming and internet-connected technologies to solve a real-world problem. They had high hopes to walk away with experiences that would help them become future scientists and engineers.

From June 11 to 16, 2017, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) hosted Code @TACC Robotics, a week-long summer camp funded by the Summer STEM Funders Organization under the supervision of the KDK Harmon Foundation. The 34 students received instruction from five staff scientists at TACC and two guest high school teachers from Dallas and Del Valle, as well as round-the-clock supervision from five undergraduate proctors. Leading the camp was Joonyee Chuah, Outreach Coordinator at the TACC.

The goal of the camp is to provide these students with their first experiences with programming, to jumpstart them and get them further ahead to things that are current in the computing world, Chuah said.

The students divided themselves into teams, each with specific roles of principal investigator, validation engineer, software developer, and roboticist. They assembled a robotic car from a kit and learned how to program the software that controls it. The robotic cars had sensors that measured the distance to objects in front, and they could be programmed to respond to that information by stopping or turning or even relaying that information to another car near it. Teams were assigned a final project based on a real-world problem, such as what action to take when cars arrive together at a four-way stop.

The Code @TACC Robotics camp went a step further than the typical introductory Lego-based robotics program by using maker-based electronics that connected to the cloud using the Particle platform. The robots assembled for the camp were three-wheeled cars that communicated via the internet and could relay events and interact with services such as Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook.

The platform allows these robots to do a lot of communication with each other that facilitates projects that you wouldnt normally be able to do in a standard high school classroom using off-the-shelf toy robotics, Chuah said. The robotic cars presented a simplified version of the cutting-edge autonomous vehicles being developed today by leading companies such as Google.

Industry outreach was an important part of the camp, and the students toured the offices of IBM in Austin, where they participated in student activities that explored the IBM Watson supercomputer and robotics connected to it. The students also visited engineering departments and computer science departments at UT Austin, as well as TACCs world-renowned Visualization Laboratory. They get a full experience of both college as well as future industry, Chuah said. Its important for students to understand that there are economic and intellectual opportunities out there.

Read the rest of the story at the TACC website.

Source: Jorge Salazar, TACC

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Code @ TACC Robotics Camp Students Solve Real-World Traffic Problems - HPCwire (blog)