Robotics Archives - Page 7 of 11

June 12, 2021June 14, 2021

Grace, the Nurse Android

Grace from Hanson Robotics is a special kind of care robot, namely a nurse android. According to the manufacturer, she was created for the COVID-19 pandemic. She is the younger sister of Sophia and Asha, but unlike them, she becomes a useful member of society thanks to her profession and skills. She has a thermal imaging camera in her chest area that she can use to measure fevers. She has mimic, gestural and natural language abilities and can show not only joy but also sadness. Overall, she always looks a little devastated. In a video, she says, “I can visit with people and brighten their day with social stimulation, entertain and help guide exercise, but also can do talk therapy, take bio readings and help health care providers assess their health, and deliver treatments” … Whether the android will gain favor with patients is hard to say. There are individual voices of male persons who long for realistic figures in this field, but the majority of people are likely to be irritated by Grace. Nevertheless, it is fascinating and media-savvy research that Hanson Robotics once again presents. Moreover, the question of whether care robots should have sexual assistance functions arises under entirely new conditions.

May 29, 2021May 29, 2021

The Digger Finger

Radhen Patel, a postdoc in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and his co-authors Rui Ouyang, Branden Romero, and Edward Adelson presented a sharp-tipped robot finger equipped with tactile sensing to meet the challenge of identifying buried objects. “In experiments, the aptly named Digger Finger was able to dig through granular media such as sand and rice, and it correctly sensed the shapes of submerged items it encountered. The researchers say the robot might one day perform various subterranean duties, such as finding buried cables or disarming buried bombs.” (MIT News, 26 May 2021) The article, titled “Digger Finger: GelSight Tactile Sensor forObject Identification Inside Granular Media,” can be accessed at arxiv.org/pdf/2102.10230.pdf.

April 19, 2021April 19, 2021

One Small Flight for Ingenuity

“That’s one small flight for Ingenuity – one giant journey for mankind.” This can be said after the successful experiment on 19 April 2021 with the tiny helicopter on Mars (photo: screenshot from NASA livestream). Ingenuity flew vertically into the air, took a selfie with its shadow, and landed safely back on the ground. The red planet is associated with many expectations and aspirations. At the moment, the surface is being explored in an unprecedented way. In a few years, humans are expected to travel to Mars. In doing so, they will also need advice and support. Because the personnel on Earth are far away, a voice assistant is a possible solution. SPACE THEA is a voicebot that shows empathy (but doesn’t have it, of course). Like GOODBOT and BESTBOT, she recognizes user problems – but unlike those chatbots, she has a voice. SPACE THEA will be developed until August 2021 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel at the School of Business FHNW. The project aims to cover several scenarios on the flight to Mars. However, a voicebot could also be useful on the planet itself, for example to control a tiny helicopter.

April 18, 2021April 18, 2021

A Four-legged Robocop

In New York City, police have taken a Boston Dynamics robot on a mission to an apartment building. Spot is a four-legged model that is advanced and looks scary to many people. The operation resulted in the arrest of an armed man. Apparently, the robot had no active role in this. This is reported by Futurism magazine in a recent article. It is also noted there that certain challenges may arise. “The robodog may not have played an active role in the arrest, but having an armed police squadron deploy a robot to an active crime scene raises red flags about civil liberties and the future of policing.” (Futurism, 15 April 2021) Even Boston Dynamics robots are not so advanced that they can play a central role in police operations. They can, however, serve to intimidate. Whether the NYPD is doing itself any favors by doing so can be questioned. The robots’ reputation will certainly not benefit from this kind of use.

March 12, 2021March 12, 2021

Cobots in Healthcare

After several postponements, the symposium “Applied AI in Healthcare: Safety, Community, and the Environment” will be held within the AAAI Spring Symposia on March 22-23, 2021. One of the presentations is titled “Co-Robots as Care Robots” (co-robots are also called cobots). The authors of the paper are Oliver Bendel, Alina Gasser, and Joel Siebenmann. From the abstract: “Cooperation and collaboration robots, co-robots or cobots for short, are an integral part of factories. For example, they work closely with the fitters in the automotive sector, and everyone does what they do best. However, the novel robots are not only relevant in production and logistics, but also in the service sector, especially where proximity between them and the users is desired or unavoidable. For decades, individual solutions of a very different kind have been developed in care. Now experts are increasingly relying on co-robots and teaching them the special tasks that are involved in care or therapy. This article presents the advantages, but also the disadvantages of co-robots in care and support, and provides information with regard to human-robot interaction and communication. The article is based on a model that has already been tested in various nursing and retirement homes, namely Lio from F&P Robotics, and uses results from accompanying studies. The authors can show that co-robots are ideal for care and support in many ways. Of course, it is also important to consider a few points in order to guarantee functionality and acceptance.” More information about the AAAI Spring Symposia is available at aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss21.php.

February 12, 2021February 12, 2021

Hyundai Now Creates Tigers

Hyundai Motor Group has revealed a robot named TIGER, which stands for Transforming Intelligent Ground Excursion Robot. According to the company, it’s the second Ultimate Mobility Vehicle (UMV) and the first designed to be uncrewed. “TIGER’s exceptional capabilities are designed to function as a mobile scientific exploration platform in extreme, remote locations. Based on a modular platform architecture, its features include a sophisticated leg and wheel locomotion system, 360-degree directional control, and a range of sensors for remote observation. It is also intended to connect to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which can fully charge and deliver TIGER to inaccessible locations.” (Media Release, 10 February 2021) A video can be viewed here. With TIGER, the company has developed a very interesting proof of concept. The combination of legs and wheels in particular could prove to be the solution of the future.

February 3, 2021February 3, 2021

Ariana Grande Bows to “Metropolis”

Ariana Grande walks in the footsteps of Fritz Lang with her video “34+35”. The director and actor is famous for his science fiction film “Metropolis” from 1927, in which a robot transforms into an artificial, human-looking woman, the copy of the real Maria (aka Mary). The video, which quotes the famous role model, was produced by Director X. V Magazine writes: “34+35” is the second track of Grande’s recent release “Positions”, “but it is first in sexually charged metaphors” (V Magazine, 17 November 2020). The robot in the “campy video” has the pretty head of Ariane Grande from the beginning. The point is to bring it to life. This happens in an apparatus reminiscent of the one in “Metropolis”. Of course, Ariana Grande is also the scientist who performs the experiment, so she corresponds to the crazy guy named Rotwang. Some lines in the song suggest that the Ariana Grande robot is a sex robot. “Can you stay up all night?/Fuck me ’til the daylight/Thirty-four, thirty-five”, sings the star from Boca Raton. V Magazine writes: “Presumably, a robot could do such a thing, and that is perhaps what this mechanized lady has been designed for.” (V Magazine, 17 November 2020) The purpose of the artificial Maria is different. She is used as a deceptive robot. As such, she is more in the tradition of the research of Ronald C. Arkin and Oliver Bendel.

February 2, 2021February 2, 2021

A Prod, a Stroke, or a Hug?

Soft robots with transparent artificial skin can detect human touch with internal cameras and differentiate between a prod, a stroke, or a hug. This is what New Scientist writes in its article “Robot that looks like a bin bag can understand what a hug is“. According to the magazine, the technology could lead to better non-verbal communication between humans and robots. What is behind this message? A scientific experiment that is indeed very interesting. “Guy Hoffman and his colleagues at Cornell University, New York, created a prototype robot with nylon skin stretched over a 1.2-metre tall cylindrical scaffold atop a platform on wheels. Inside the cylinder sits a commercial USB camera which is used to interpret different types of touch on the nylon.” (New Scientist, 29 January 2021) In recent years, there have been several prototypes, studies and surveys on hugging robots. For example, the projects with PR2, Hugvie, and HUGGIE are worth mentioning. Cornell University’s research certainly represents another milestone in this context and in a way puts humans in the foreground.