Category Archives: Robotics

More than 120 teams are expected to take part in the competition from Thursday through Saturday at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center, with a chance to advance to the world competition to be held in April in St. Louis.

Teams from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and North Dakota will be competing in the Duluth regionals, according to a news release from the Duluth East Daredevils robotics team.

FIRST is an acronym of "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology." Each year's challenge is unveiled in January, giving teams less than two months to build and refine their robots to complete the designated tasks.

In this year's challenge, called Steamworks, robots must pick up balls and put them into a "boiler." The more balls that go into the boiler, the more "steam" builds in the boiler to power an "airship." Two students will be in the airship, and the robots will need to move gears to the airship, where students will put the gears together to power the ship. In the final part of the competition, the robots will then pull themselves up a rope to board the ship.

Practice rounds at the Duluth regionals will take place starting at noon Thursday, with competition starting at 9 a.m. Friday and Saturday. Final matches will take place from about 1:30-4:30 p.m. Saturday.

The competition is open to the public, and free to all spectators. Find more information at mnfirst.org/frc/duluth-regionals.

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Robotics competition returns to DECC Thursday - Duluth News Tribune

Inside the Depot in downtown Minneapolis Tuesday evening, several dozen young women some with dyed pink hair showed off robots they had built, sometimes using everyday objects.

Their audience was engineering professionals at the Robotics Alley Conference and Expo.

Izzie Mack, a member of girl group the Rubies, used game controllers to drive the groups 18-cubic-inch robot down the aisle of the convention space.

The Rubies and the Ponytail Posse, from St. Paul, were the only lady-centric groups that participated in Tuesdays March of the Robots event at the conference.

Its important to break the stereotype that women are not interested in the engineering field, said Mack, a 10th-grader at Southwest High School.

Girls dont get into science or they think its too nerdy, said Nancy Koshy, a member of Ponytail Posse.

Participating in industry events and seeing robotics at play in everyday life inspire these teens to continue studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

The Robotics Alley Conference and Expo, an annual event held in the Twin Cities, was created to spur public and private partnerships in the worlds of robotics and automation.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who greeted conference attendees via video, said that robotics technology will transform the workforce and economy.

The statement resonated as industry professionals spoke about cybersecurity, 3-D printing of the human body, the future of agriculture and self-driving vehicles.

This is so empowering ... this is the future, said Mitra Kian, a ninth-grade student at Southwest High School and member of the Rubies.

Kian and the other girls were adamant about making a career in the STEM fields. They also are excited about the future: What might their careers could look like in 10 or 20 years?

When the Ponytail Posse demonstrated its robot Stacy, one of her creators proudly showed how they had used part of a standard dresser drawer to help their mechanical teammate make up-and-down movements.

Drawer slides as a lift mechanism, she said. Who would have thought to do that?

Excerpt from:

Girls help shatter stereotype at robotics industry expo - Minneapolis Star Tribune

For more details, we spoke with Kenneally andDe, along withGhost Robotics CEO Jiren Parikh.

IEEE Spectrum: How does a legged robot like Minitaur compare to robots with wheels or tracks?

Ghost Robotics: On flat surfaces with no objects in their path, wheeled robots are more efficient than tracked, legged, and even aerial robots. In sand, mud, and rougher terrain, tracks are superior to wheels. However, with fixed objects, obstacles, and vertical surfaces in the path of a tracked robot with no alternative path, legged robots are superior. Even if moderate objects and obstacles can be overcome by tracks, continuous unstructured terrain over a large field of operation reduces the energy efficiency of tracked devices when compared to dynamic legged robots.

Another advantage is that legged robots typically have a lot more actuated degrees of freedom than similar sized tracked or aerial robots, [and those additional DoF] can be recruited for tasks like reorientation, manipulation, and getting the robot unstuck in a much more flexible and versatile way. In scenariossuch as sand and mud flats, tracked devices do well up to the point of getting stuck but they have limited options for escape, whereas the Minitaur will have greater maneuverability and escape behaviors. Additionally, you would almost certainly need to attach an arm to a wheeled, tracked, or aerial robot to open a door, while we have shown the Minitaur doing this without any modifications to its body.

The primary challenge in the adoption of legged robots has been the difficulty of coordinating the many degrees of freedom and balancing on a variety of terrains. Minitaur was designed specifically to allow for very flexible and versatile software control of its limbs at a high bandwidth, which gives the control designer a lot of freedom to design control algorithms that can keep improving as time goes on (without needing to modify the robot body).

Whats your experience been like with the durability of Minitaur now that youre doing dynamic testing outdoors?

Considering the Minitaur is still pre-production, we have been subjecting the robot prototype to exhaustive physical experimentation from Day 1, and it has been quite hard (and fun) to try and damage it in a way that isnt easily field repairable. Large falls can bend the aluminum legs, but those are easy to either bend back or replace without loss of functionality. The chassis, even in its current design state, has been quite robust, and with appropriate protection for the motors, the legs become the primary concern. The direct-drive actuators are inherently robust since there are no gears to break due to impact loading, and we have no hydraulic system or force/torque sensors that can be damaged.

One of the core design principles of Minitaur is its reduced mechanical complexity when compared to other legged robots and tracked devices. Tracks look simple, but require complex suspension mechanisms which would be hard to repair on the fly. With regards to mobility, if a tread or suspension mechanism gets damaged on a tracked robot, it is only able to travel in circles, but if one of Minitaurs legs are bent, or a leg is immobilized, it can continue to limp away.

Can you describe how Minitaur changes its gait to adapt reactively to different types of terrain?

A very basic example is that the walk gait is designed to use feedback to react to perturbations (like the toes slipping on ice, or the uneven nature of walking on a rock bed). If you closely examine the video of Minitaur walking on ice, you can see that the legs recirculate and move much faster when they start slipping, always swinging and repositioning under the body to prevent the body from falling on the ground. A conventional way to design multi-legged walking has been to use a fixed clock signal that moves the legs at a fixed frequency (often along a fixed trajectory). Obviously when the legs start slipping and sliding, with a rigid locomotion architecture, it would be very challenging (if not impossible) to keep the legs under the body without feedback from the legs and environment.

Your videos show Minitaur using lots of creative ways of moving across varied terrain. What kinds of multi-modal locomotion are you working on?

Weve already shown fence climbing with toe attachments in our first video, and intend to demonstrate other climbing behaviors in future videos using fixed leg attachments that will support climbing various vertical surfaces. Depending on the use case, we expect to have a future design where leg attachments can be interchanged in the field.

We are also working on modifications with a confidential customer to repurpose Minitaur to operate as a surface and sub-surface swimmer, and submersible platform, that would operate on a seafloor or riverbed using flipper legs. If you look at Minitaur with the legs retracted, you can see how we can make a water-sealed design with sponsons for stability and air bladder to control buoyancy without much effort. Our robot is relatively quiet (no gearbox operating noise), which makes it useful in a variety of scientific and military applications, and it also has very high specific power (which is one of the limiting resources for underwater vehicles).

How far can Minitaur walk on two legs? Is there potential for it to manipulate with the other two legs while balancing?

The bipedal walking is a work-in-progress and one of the more challenging behaviors were working onwe dont think theres currently another 3D biped in the world that uses only four actuators. However, weve been quite pleased with the progress weve made. Minitaur can take up to 20 steps [using two legs] and then drop down onto four legs when it knows it can no longer maintain its bipedal state. Were continuing our research and intend to have it operate in a bipedal state for much longer.

Using one or two of the legs for various tasks is critical behavior for the Minitaur that we are researching (for example, door opening). Bipedal use cases include object manipulation, positioning the robot for climbing a vertical surface, gaining a vantage point for a sensor reading, escape maneuvers, and bracing/flailing to aid balance.

How well does Minitaur scale upwards to medium-sized (or larger) legged robots?

Were pushing up against fundamental limits of torque density with the commercially available electric motors we currently use. The selected motors are critical in keeping the machine at a price point that will be on par with and even below existing tracked devices, and at a much lower cost than other legged robots. With the current motor technology, we cant build a direct-drive machine as agile as Minitaur at a length-scale much larger than Minitaurs 40-centimeterlength. We can make a heavier version at the same scale that would have better payload capability, but wed have to make sacrifices to increase the length scale. We are also considering modified/custom motor designs in the future for specific use-cases where cost is less of an issue.

Having said that, we have design efforts underway that will allow us to scale Minitaur down and deliver the same functionality with a smaller chassis and payload capacity for specific use-cases where a smaller form factor is necessary. Stay tuned on this front.

More here:

Ghost Robotics' Minitaur Demonstrates Impressive New Skills - IEEE Spectrum

Wilton Librarys robotics team, Singularity Technology, recently qualified in the CT State Competition to move to the Super-Regional Competitions in Scranton, Pa., in March. Standing left to right: Rohit Singhal, Albert Wei, Alex Cameron, Harris Patnaik, Rishabh Raniwala; kneeling left to right: Navod Jayawardhane, Khloe Rackley, Emilie McCann, Cathy Campbell, Nickia Muraskin.

For the first time ever, Singularity Technology, Wilton Librarys robotics team, has qualified to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Super-Regionals Championship, a global robotics competition, to be held in March in Scranton, Pa.

The library team had an outstanding performance at the FTC CT State Championships on Feb. 18 at Greens Farms Academy in Westport. Earning second place in the state competition, the team was recognized for excelling in all facets of the challenge, including innovative and successful robot design and the embodiment of the FIRST value of Gracious Professionalism.

We are so excited to have come this far, said team captain Nickia Muraskin of Singularity Technologys performance against 23 other teams from around Connecticut.

FTC competitions are alliance-based. That means teams are partnered with one another for every match. Alliances change from match to match and former partners turn into adversaries. Its all part of FTCs goal of developing team-building skills and cooperative approaches to problem solving among the young engineers which they summarize with the trademarked terms Gracious Professionalism and Coopertition.

Albert Wei, the teams software captain, finds wisdom in Gracious Professionalism.

To me, it is less about the robot that we make and more about the way we act, he said. It has motivated us to integrate as many people as we can into our building process, because our product turns out better when everyone works together.

Susan Lauricella, Wilton Librarys teen services and maker space manager noted, This has been such a wonderful learning and bonding exercise. The group has grown in experience in the last year or so and really has come together as a team in the true sense and spirit of the word.

The Singularity Technology team consists of 10 middle and high school students: Cathy Campbell, Alex Cameron, Navod Jayawardhane, Emilie McCann, Nickia Muraskin, Harris Patnaik, Khloe Rackley, Rishabh Raniwala, Rohit Singhal, and Albert Wei. Members meet and work at the library with volunteer mentors Tom Abend and Paul Lauricella and library staffers Susan Lauricella and Thomas Kozak.

Part of the teams success comes from their integration of various sensors and custom 3D-printed designs. The team uses online CAD programs and the 3D printer in the librarys Innovation Station to create everything from bevel gears to cap ball holding parts, all in SingulTechs signature blue and green. Team member Rishabh Raniwala is most proud of how far our coding has come, its been a huge improvement over last year.

This year, the team made a strategic decision to focus on two specific challenges with the robot: lifting the cap ball and pressing infrared beacons in both autonomous and teleop modes.

Our cap ball lifting and beacon-pressing mechanisms are incredibly reliable, said team member Harris Patnaik. Much more so than those of our competitors.

Our team needs to spend a lot of time practicing driving in high-stress situations, so we can be prepared for anything that could possibly go wrong, added Emilie McCann, the teams build captain. Additionally, we have to create lots of promotional materials not only for our own team, but for FIRST as a whole.

The team is most grateful for the support of Jet Blue, Wilton Hardware, Glenn Hemmerle and McHancock County LLC, as well as Wilton Library for the initial funding. Anyone wishing to support the teams push to the Super-Regionals may make an online donation through Wilton Librarys website, http://www.wiltonlibrary.org, and specify Robotics in the comments field.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a nonprofit organization with the mission to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering, and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.

To learn more about the FIRST Tech Challenge, visit http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/ftc or http://7034st.wixsite.com/singultech to see more of the team and its robot.

Originally posted here:

Robotics team off to championships - The Wilton Bulletin

February 28, 2017 by Julie Jacobs The Frshly dispenser. Credit: New Jersey Institute of Technology

Six different cuisines with 30 combos all served hot within 90 seconds, and patrons need only pick, swipe and eat. That's what Frshly, a fully automated "vend-caf" and the brainchild of NJIT alumnus Satish ChamyVelumani, provides to a growing number of hungry consumers on the move through India's railway system and airports. It's an offer the tech startup, established in 2013, calls "plated happiness."

Here's how Frshly works: Customers desiring fresh, hot food from popular local restaurants choose from a selection of stocked menu items at a Frshly state-of-the-art dispensing machine. The company's proprietary technology, a "recipe" of robotics and algorithms, then enables the quick procurement, takeaway-friendly wrapping and prompt delivery of the order. To ensure that the food is always fresh, Frshly restocks the dispensing machine regularly.

The meals "are packed according to the given specifications for every mealtime at the participating restaurant kitchens and then are transported to the Frshly outlets where they are stacked," explained ChamyVelumani. "This is as good as any convenience store where products are pre-stacked based on predictive demand analysis."

Customers also can place an order, as well as specify a pickup location and time, via the free Frshly app, available from the Apple and Google Play stores. The app secures their meal until they collect it, at which time the dispenser reheats and serves it. The cost for Frshly meals ranges from Rs 59-159 in Indian currency (approximately $1-$2.50).

ChamyVelumani has introduced Frshly in three cities in India: Bengaluru, Chennai and Secunderabad. Each market features different cuisine.

"The idea is to serve the brands from the cities in which we operate," ChamyVelumani noted. "Frshly is an ecosystem for multiple restaurants to get on board and reach out to new customers. Even though Frshly is an aggregation platform, the brands that participate are curated based on the market demand."

In addition to train stations and the Chennai International Airport, the company also has a presence at information technology parks and large information technology companies and commercial technical support locationsa pipeline ChamyVelumani describes as strong.

Food for Thought

The Frshly journey, from "back of the napkin" concept sketches to the first customer making a selection, took ChamyVelumani two-and-a-half years to complete. He faced some challenges along the way, particularly with building the interface between the ordering app, the dispenser and the enterprise resource planning system.

"With Frshly, every single thing had to be developed from scratch," he said. "There were a lot of dependencies. We are talking about an entire ecosystem here, including hardware."

Fortunately, pitching Frshly to the Indian Railways Network and airport authorities proved much easier. Indian Railways had been searching for an innovation in the food and beverage space and Frshly fit the bill. A successful pilot in Chennai Central Railway Station followed and since then Frshly has opened two more stores in India, with a third and possibly more poised to launch this year. Frshly may even find its way soon inside the compartments on long-distance trains.

First-Gen Entrepreneur

"First" is certainly a recurring theme of the Frshly story. The business is a first of its kind and the first commercial venture for ChamyVelumani, who is the first in his family to become an entrepreneur. All in all, he said, it "has been a great ride so far."

Before returning to his home country to start Frshly, he worked in the manufacturing industry in the U.S. for 11 years in a variety of engineering roles at 3M Purification Inc. (formerly CUNO Incorporated). And just before joining 3M, he earned his M.S. in manufacturing systems engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT); he also holds an MBA in global enterprise management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

"I was working in India as a mechanical engineer for about two years, mostly doing 2D drafting and 3D modeling. I became bored of that work and I didn't think those jobs were paving the way for me to achieve my future dreams. I wanted to get a broader exposure to manufacturing and through my friends I heard about the manufacturing systems engineering course that was offered at NJIT," offered ChamyVelumani, who arrived at the university in 2000. "Overall, the course work was an eye opener. I particularly enjoyed my design-for-manufacturing classes with [Professor Sanchoy] Das."

Feedback and Future

To further improve service, ChamyVelumani and his Frshly staffabout 60 people including store ownersare fielding recommendations for new cuisines and meal quantities from customers, who on the whole have appreciated the convenience of getting their favorite food brands at the touch of a button.

Looking ahead, Frshly is expanding its operations into Singapore this March and also working to set up stand-alone dispensers for several large food brands. ChamyVelumani's vision for his company includes moves into other Asia Pacific countries, the Middle East and ultimately North America.

ChamyVelumani encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to dream big and work hard. He credits his NJIT education with helping shape him into who he is today.

"My master's program put an entire business sense of things in my head," he reflected. "I always say this: 'It is not the subjects that we study, but it is the application that makes the difference.' NJIT helped me with learning the application."

Explore further: Why restaurants want you to order food on your phone

More information: For more information on Frshly, visit gofrshly.com

Swipe, click, food. The ability to order food with the click of a few buttons on a smartphone is becoming widespread - even fast-food companies are getting in on the action. But the technology - which in some cases tracks ...

US drone delivery service Flirtey on Monday announced that its self-piloting flying machines have whisked flu medicine, hot food and more from 7-Eleven convenience stores to customers' homes.

In the basement of a Bangalore building, hundreds of young Indians sit in neat rows of desks typing furiously, all dreaming of becoming the new Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.

The food delivery market just got more crowded with the launch Tuesday morning of a new on-demand meal app by Uber.

Research in India has found that restaurateurs in different food establishments there can influence how long their customers stay, how much they eat and whether or not they come back for seconds. The study of music as an ...

Apple said Wednesday it has asked the Indian government for permission to open its first stores in the country, paving the way for its feted brands to join the fast-growing smartphone market.

The sight of propeller-like rotating blades positioned high up the pole of a tall horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) may be familiar to many. Often grouped in wind farms, HAWTs provide significant amounts of energy for local ...

The United States shares 5,525 miles of land border with Canada and 1,989 miles with Mexico. Monitoring these borders, which is the responsibility of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), is an enormous task. Detecting, ...

A University of Central Florida professor has invented a way to use light to continuously monitor a surgical patient's blood, for the first time providing a real-time status during life-and-death operations.

The smartphone revolution is poised to go onto the next levelwith "superphones" equipped with artificial intelligence now on the horizon.

The number of mobile phone users globally will surpass five billion by the middle of this year, according to a study released Monday by GSMA, the association of mobile operators.

Thousands of ants converge to follow the most direct path from their colony to their food and back. A swarm of inexpensive, unmanned drones quickly map an offshore oil spill.

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Frshly uses robotics and algorithms to deliver fresh, hot food to customers - Phys.Org

Forbes

Lily Robotics Promises Refunds As It Files For Bankruptcy Protection Forbes By Aaron Tilley and Ryan Mac. Lily Robotics, the hyped drone startup that shut down last month amid a consumer-protection civil suit from the San Francisco district attorney's office, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday. In documents ... Shuttered drone startup Lily Robotics details failure, refund plans in bankruptcy filingThe Mercury News all 5 news articles »

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Lily Robotics Promises Refunds As It Files For Bankruptcy Protection - Forbes

As robots become integrated into society more widely, we need to be sure theyll behave well among us. In 1942, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov attempted to lay out a philosophical and moral framework for ensuring robots serve humanity, and guarding against their becoming destructive overlords. This effort resulted in what became known as Asimovs Three Laws of Robotics:

Today, more than 70 years after Asimovs first attempt, we have much more experience with robots, including having them drive us around, at least under good conditions. We are approaching the time when robots in our daily lives will be making decisions about how to act. Are Asimovs Three Laws good enough to guide robot behavior in our society, or should we find ways to improve on them?

Asimovs I, Robot stories explore a number of unintended consequences and downright failures of the Three Laws. In these early stories, the Three Laws are treated as forces with varying strengths, which can have unintended equilibrium behaviors, as in the stories Runaround and Catch that Rabbit, requiring human ingenuity to resolve. In the story Liar!, a telepathic robot, motivated by the First Law, tells humans what they want to hear, failing to foresee the greater harm that will result when the truth comes out. The robopsychologist Susan Calvin forces it to confront this dilemma, destroying its positronic brain.

In Escape!, Susan Calvin depresses the strength of the First Law enough to allow a super-intelligent robot to design a faster-than-light interstellar transportation method, even though it causes the deaths (but only temporarily!) of human pilots. In The Evitable Conflict, the machines that control the worlds economy interpret the First Law as protecting all humanity, not just individual human beings. This foreshadows Asimovs later introduction of the Zeroth Law that can supersede the original three, potentially allowing a robot to harm a human being for humanitys greater good.

A robot may not harm humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

It is reasonable to fear that, without ethical constraints, robots (or other artificial intelligences) could do great harm, perhaps to the entire human race, even by simply following their human-given instructions.

The 1991 movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day begins with a well-known science fiction scenario: an AI system called Skynet starts a nuclear war and almost destroys the human race. Deploying Skynet was a rational decision (it had a perfect operational record). Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate, scaring its creators, who try to shut it down. Skynet fights back (as a critical defense system, it was undoubtedly programmed to defend itself). Skynet finds an unexpected solution to its problem (through creative problem solving, unconstrained by common sense or morality).

Less apocalyptic real-world examples of out-of-control AI have actually taken place. High-speed automated trading systems have responded to unusual conditions in the stock market, creating a positive feedback cycle resulting in a flash crash. Fortunately, only billions of dollars were lost, rather than billions of lives, but the computer systems involved have little or no understanding of the difference.

While no simple fixed set of mechanical rules will ensure ethical behavior, we can make some observations about properties that a moral and ethical system should have in order to allow autonomous agents (people, robots or whatever) to live well together. Many of these elements are already expected of human beings.

These properties are inspired by a number of sources including the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Principles of Robotics and recent work on the cognitive science of morality and ethics focused onneuroscience,social psychology,developmental psychology, andphilosophy.

The EPSRC takes the position that robots are simply tools, for which humans must take responsibility. At the extreme other end of the spectrum is the concern that super-intelligent, super-powerful robots could suddenly emerge and control the destiny of the human race, for better or for worse. The following list defines a middle ground, describing how future intelligent robots should learn, like children do, how to behave according to the standards of our society.

Human morality and ethics are learned by children over years, but the nature of morality and ethics itself varies with the society and evolves over decades and centuries. No simple fixed set of moral rules, whether Asimovs Three Laws or the Ten Commandments, can be adequate guidance for humans or robots in our complex society and world. Through observations like the ones above, we are beginning to understand the complex feedback-driven learning process that leads to morality.

Benjamin Kuipers, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Original post:

We Need to Update Our Rules for Robotics - Futurism

By Nelson Oliveira, Stamford Advocate

Photo: Contributed / The Harvey School

Harvey School student Wendy Lichtenberg, of Stamford.

Harvey School student Wendy Lichtenberg, of Stamford.

Harvey School students Wendy Lichtenberg, of Stamford, and Clayton Collum during a February match of the VEX IQ Challenge state-qualifier competition at East Rockaway High School on Long Island.

Harvey School students Wendy Lichtenberg, of Stamford, and Clayton Collum during a February match of the VEX IQ Challenge state-qualifier competition at East Rockaway High School on Long Island.

Stamford girl headed to robotics finals

Stamford resident Wendy Lichtenberg, a seventh-grader at the Harvey School in Katonah, N.Y., will compete in a statewide robotics tournament this weekend.

She and her sixth-grade partner, Clayton Collum, placed eighth out of 40 teams in the final match of the VEX IQ Challenge state-qualifier competition earlier this month at East Rockaway High School on Long Island.

The pair will compete Saturday in the New York state tournament in Massapequa.

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Stamford girl headed to robotics finals - The Advocate

Image: Boston Dynamics via YouTube Boston Dynamics' Handle is a humanoid robot on wheels, and it's amazing.

When Boston Dynamics introduced its massively upgraded Atlaslast year, we said the robot coulddo things weve never seen other robots doing before, making it one of the most advanced humanoids in existence. But now, after seeing the video that Boston Dynamics just released to officially unveil itsnewest creation, Handle, a sort of Atlas on wheels,well just say it again: Handle cando things weve never seen other robots doing before, making it one of the most advanced humanoids in existence.

Wheels are a great invention,Marc Raibert, founder and president of Boston Dynamics, tells IEEE Spectrum, adding that Handle, which uses a wheel-leg hybrid system,can have the best of both worlds.

You probably saw footageof Handle a few weeks ago, when Raibert gave a talk in California and someone filmed the screen with a phone and posted it on YouTube. When we asked Boston Dynamics about the leaked video, the company saiditwasnt ready to discuss the new robot and suggested that we wait. Now, finally, we have more details about Handle, and Raibert even answered a few of our questions on why and how they built the robot.

Boston Dynamicssays Handle is an R&D robot, so although it can perform a number of useful tasks, like carrying 45-kilogram crates, it probably wont be commercially availableanytime soon. Handle has a range of24 kilometers on a battery charge, which is much more than what it would be able to cover with traditional bipedal robot locomotion. Using wheels also helps reduce thenumber of degrees of freedom,and the company says Handle is significantlyless complex than some of the quadruped and biped robots that precededit.

Indeed, this kind of multi-modal locomotion is highly effective. In a much more limited capacity, its what helped DRC-HUBO win the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals: Being able to use both wheels and legs helps your robot efficiently adapt to different situations, trading the ability to traverse rough terrain for speed (and stability, which legged robots can have trouble with)and back again whenever necessary, just like you would as a human with a pair of rollerblades.

Teaching bipeds to move like this seems like an idea with a lot of potential, especially if Boston Dynamics can develop a generalized controller that allows robots with regular legs to take advantage of wheelsimagine the next generation of Atlasbeing equipped with an integrated pair of roller shoes likeHeelys. Were not sure if thats part of the companys plans, but hereswhat Raibert told us about Handle and his teams experience using wheels after famously building so many legged robots.

IEEE Spectrum:How did the idea to build a wheeled robot come about, and how long did it take to build it?

Marc Raibert:Weve had the idea for building a robot that combined legs with wheels for a long time, but never had the opportunity to explore it.We started last summer and had something working in about six months. We accelerated the project by using components for power, arms, and upper body that were originally designed for Atlas.

Were you able to reuse or adapt any of the bioinspired control strategies youve used so successfully in legged robots?

Much of the control used in Handle leverages our teams experience with the quadruped and biped robots.The software is not exactly the same, but the balance and dynamic control principles have a lot in common and share the same physics-based roots.

Is Handles upper body an Atlas torso, or a completely new design? And isthe robot all electric or does it use hydraulics?

Yes, it uses Atlas torso and a slightly modified version of Atlas arms. [For power we use] electric power (batteries), but both electric and hydraulic actuation.

How do you and your team feel about working with wheels after working on legged designs for so long?

Wheels are a great invention. But wheels work best on flat surfaces and legs can go anywhere. By combining wheels and legs, Handle can have the best of both worlds.

IEEE Spectrum's 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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Boston Dynamics Officially Unveils Its Wheel-Leg Robot: "Best of Both Worlds" - IEEE Spectrum

Swinburne has opened its state-of-the-art Factory of the Future to a team of young women set to compete in an international robotics competition.

Comprised of 17 students from Melbourne high schools, the girls-only RoboCats spent six weeks at Swinburnes Hawthorn campus programming and building a50kg robot for the FIRST Robotics Competition.

Led by mentors Dr Therese Keane, Deputy Chair of Education at Swinburne, and Swinburne alumni Milorad Cerovac, the team will compete in the South Pacific Regional at the Sydney Olympic Park in March.

The theme for this years competition is Steamworks, with teams challenged to launch a large airship via the collection, transportation, and depositing of plastic gears and balls.

Dr Keane, who co-founded the team with Mr Cerovac in 2015, says the event is an opportunity to introduce young women to disciplines in which women are traditionally underrepresented.

The interesting thing is that many of the girls do not see this as maths, science, technology or engineering, they see it as a fun activity where they have the chance to build a robot and make friends.

In 2016, the RoboCats were one of three all-girl teams at the South Pacific competition, and the only one from Victoria.

Its fantastic to see the girls starting conversations about gender diversity, Dr Keane says.

The RoboCats are sponsored by the Swinburne Innovation Precinct, with additional support from the Faculty of Health, Arts and Design, the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology, BAE Systems, Ford Australia, Rockwell Automation, Salesforce, Ivetech and Boeing.

They also had a team of mentors that included Swinburne Senior Electrical Technician Antonio Lione and Swinburne Bachelor of Engineering (Robotics and Mechatronics) (Hons)/Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) graduate Devon Boyd.

We had more support than ever this year and it has made a huge difference, Dr Keane says.

The girls loved the whole experience of being on campus and being able to use all of the facilities.

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Young women gear up for FIRST Robotics Competition - Swinburne University of Technology