15 August 2008

Robots: DelFly and Europe's Micro Air Vehicle Competition

In this episode we talk about two major events in aerial robotics in the last few weeks: the announcement of the Delfly Micro and the 2008 European Micro Air Vehicle (EMAV) Competition. We first speak with Christophe de Wagter, a member of the Dutch team that's been churning out amazing flapping-wing robots in the last few years. Our second interview features Peter Vörsmann, chair of this year's EMAV competition, to explain the latest advances in autonomous flying vehicles.

Christophe de Wagter

In a recent press release a Dutch team of researchers from the Delft University of Technology announced the DelFly Micro, the latest and smallest member of the DelFly family, achieving flight at a very impressive 3g. Not only can this robot fly for 3 minutes, it actually carries a camera, and thus can sense its environment and is already capable of some basic autonomous flight.



De Wagter is one of the main developers of the DelFly family of ornithopters and tells us about the new platform's capabilities, as well as the motivations of the project. He also tells us about the recent EMAV'08 competition in Germany and the impressive results of the DelFly II, the precursor to the DelFly Micro.



Peter Vörsmann

With its third edition in Braunschweig, Germany, the European Micro Air Vehicle competition (EMAV) reunited the MAV family of flapping, rotary and flying wing robots. The indoor and outdoor competitions were focussed on advancing the state-of-the art in aircraft maneuverability and autonomy while minimizing the size of the MAVs (see the mission description and rules). The 14 outdoor teams and 9 indoor teams showed off their platforms as they swooped over forests through arches and up a chimney, a hand-full of the MAVs performing autonomously.

The chair of the competition, Prof. Peter Vörsmann from the TU Braunschweig and Director of the Institute of Aerospace Systems, tells us about his view on the event, its challenges and impact. He also presents his Institute's work on MAVs with autopilot technologies, meteorological MAVs and his future aerobatic robots.

Links:

Latest News:

Visit the Robots Forum for links and discussions about the RED teaching robot, Hanson and Byrne's singing robot and the iRobot Negotiator presented in the podcast.

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01 August 2008

Robots: Robot Blogosphere

In this week's episode we speak with two robot passionates who have been bringing you news and views on robotics through their blogs. We first speak to Steven Rainwater from Texas who is a founding editor of robots.net, a news website on robotics. We then go to Boston where Mikell Taylor talked to Sabine about the IEEE Spectrum Automaton blog and her work at Bluefin Robotics Corporation on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles.

Steven Rainwater

Steven Rainwater is one of the founding editors of robots.net, one of the longest-running news sites devoted primarily to robotics on the web. Along with two other robot obsessives from the Dallas Personal Robotics Group, he has been actively running this online community since 2001.

Rainwater takes us on a journey into the history of the hobbyist robotics community, starting in the days of BBS before the internet had a chance to make a foothold. He then tells us about his experiences in the hobbyist community, and some of his worries about the future of the field. Will hobbyist robotics continue expanding, or will it disappear with the arrival of the Roomba? He may have the answer.

Mikell Taylor

Mikell Taylor's passion for robots has had her blogging away on the IEEE Spectrum Automaton blog. Comfortably seated in her Boston kitchen, she presents her expert insight on robotics in the media, her view on what to look for in the future and why consumer robots have a special place in her interests.

Besides scanning the web for robot scoops, Taylor is a system engineer at the Bluefin Robotics Corporation where she works on sensor ridden autonomous underwater vehicles for the military, commercial purposes or....treasure hunting! She gives us a behind the scene overview of what these missile-like robots have been doing in the great blue and the challenges to overcome in navigation, control and designing hardware which will work under loads of water pressure.

Links:

Latest News:

Visit the Robots Forum for links and discussions about the Delfly Micro, Microsoft's Receptionist of the Future and WowWee's latest robot cubs presented in the podcast.

View and post comments on this episode in the forum

14 July 2008

Robots: Modular and Reconfigurable Robotics

In today's episode we focus on modular robotics, or robots assembled out of many smaller modules. Whether all the modules are the same ('homogeneous') or of different types ('heterogeneous'), modular robots can accomplish many different tasks simply by adjusting their configuration. We speak with two experts in the field, Kasper Støy from Denmark and Robert Fitch from Australia.

Kasper Støy

Kasper Støy is an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, famous for his pioneering work with self-reconfiguring modular robots such as the CONRO. Much of Kasper's work involves the design of algorithms to control the locomotion or self-reconfiguration of modular robots into useful shapes, such as the simulated 747 seen below.



Støy shares his recent experience at the ICRA Contingency Challenge, a competition in which teams have only a few hours to solve an unexpected problem in a planetary environment using only the material they have at hand. To achieve this goal Støy's team integrated several different types of modular robots, including the ATRON (seen below) homogeneous robot and his latest creation, the Odin heterogeneous robot. Along with some LEGO and a bit of duct tape, Støy's team managed to put together a system that could potentially be used to complete tasks on Mars. Check out all their videos on the team's YouTube channel.



Robert Fitch
Our second interview is with Robert Fitch who is a research fellow with the Australian Centre for Field Robotics in Sydney, Australia. Fitch received his PhD in computer science with Daniela Rus from Dartmouth College in 2004 and then held a research position at the National ICT Australia in Sydney. He presents his latest self-reconfiguring robot whose millions of simulated modules can make a large cube robot locomote in any type of environment. By changing its shape on the go, the large cube can ooze around and over obstacles without splitting. To render a system which is scalable in the number of modules, he has been looking at how to control the reconfiguration of his robots in a decentralized manner, possibly using learning techniques to automatically determine the interesting moves to make. Finally Fitch presents the envisioned applications and hardware implementations for his self-reconfigurable modular robots.

Links:

Latest News:

Visit the Robots Forum for links and discussions about Japanese worker-chasing surveillance robots, shopping from the comfort of your home with your robotic best friend and the Care-O-bot 3 advanced household robot presented in the podcast.

View and post comments on this episode in the forum

04 July 2008

Robots: Robot Soccer

To close this year's soccer season after Spain's victory in the EUROCUP we went to the robotic kingdom to see who was driving the game. With Prof. Manuela Veloso from Carnegie Mellon University and President-Elect of the International RoboCup Federation, we'll be looking behind the scene of the best known competition in robot soccer. Finally, we'll be discussing the future of artificial dribblers and their odds against the human 2050 world champions with a poll and discussion on our forum.

Manuela Veloso Robot Soccer

Manuela Veloso is Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, President-Elect of the International RoboCup Federation and leader of the Coral Research Group (Cooperate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn). Since the first official Robocup soccer games in 1997, she's been active in presenting teams to the Sony AIBO 4-legged league, the smallsize league, simulation league and Segway league with a great success at adding stars to the shirts of her robotic players with numerous first places in world and US championships.

In this episode we'll be focusing on CMDragons' cookie-box-like omni-wheeled robots from the small size league and their off-board perception.



We'll also be looking at how the CMDash team has tamed the AIBO robot dogs to perceive their world and cooperate in a decentralized manner. Veloso gives us some insight on the challenges related to competing against different opponents and the need for teams to adapt during the games.



Finally, since the AIBOs are no longer produced, the RoboCup Federation is now making way for the Nao humanoid as the next challenging platform in robot soccer along with other research driving leagues such as the Nanogram league previously featured in Talking Robots (see Brad Nelson's interview).

Poll
Do you think robots will be able to beat humans at soccer by 2050?

Yes
No




View results

More discussions on this topic on our forum.

Links:

Latest News:

Visit the Robots Forum for links and discussions about Pixar Animation's Wall-E Robot Movie, the cutest robots as selected by TIME magazine and the 2008 European Robot Football Cup mentioned in the podcast.

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20 June 2008

Robots: A Robot Fly at Harvard and at the MoMA

This episode features an interview with Robert Wood about his micro-robotic fly, as well as a talk with the curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Rob Wood Rob Wood's Robot fly

Professor Robert Wood is the founder and director of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab at Harvard University. He initially started out at Ron Fearing's Biomimetic Lab at Berkley working on the Micromechanical Flying Insect (MFI) project (see Talking Robots interview). Strong of his experience with designing the tiny, he went on to build his own microscale robots for aerial, terrestrial, and aquatic environments. His recent article in IEEE Spectrum Magazine, "Fly, Robot Fly" describes the first flight of his tethered fly:

« It began when I took a stick-thin winged robot, not much larger than a fingertip, and anchored it between two taut wires, rather like a miniature space shuttle tethered to a launchpad. Next I switched on the external power supply. Within milliseconds the carbon-fiber wings, 15 millimeters long, began to whip forward and back 120 times per second, flapping and twisting just like an actual insect's wings. The fly shot straight upward on the track laid out by the wires. As far as I know, this was the first flight of an insect-size robot. »



Now that the micromechanical structure has proven it has sufficient thrust to actually lift the robot off the ground, the questions focus on how to power the robot insect and what sensors and control could allow it to perform its intended long term applications, namely search and rescue, hazardous environment exploration, environmental monitoring, and reconnaissance.

Wood also gives us some insight on how Biology has been driving his research and how he hopes to be able to return the favor by using his platform to study flies in nature.

Chaotic flight controlled, robot insect swarms, tech-driving miniaturization… let’s wait and see.

Paola Antonelli

Rob Wood's robotic fly was featured as part of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City entitled Design and the Elastic Mind. We had a talk with Paola Antonelli, the curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, about the role of design in helping people cope with momentous changes in science and technology. How will designers help people adapt as robots become ubiquitous in our daily lives? How does our experience in nature affect the design of future robotic systems? Paola takes us through a brief tour of a designer's perspective of science and technology.

Links:

Latest News:

Visit the Robots Forum for links and discussions about iRobot's "Seaglider" underwater robot, the DARPA contract awarded to iRobot for the Chembot, the sale of the autonomous car "Odin" and EMA the robotic girlfriend mentioned in the podcast.

View and post comments in the forum
Published: 5.6.2008/dm        Last update: 1.8.2008/mw

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