Lilly interviews Amanda Prorok, Professor of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. Prorok discusses her research on multi-robot and multi-agent systems and learning coordination policies via Graph Neural Networks. They dig into her recent work on self-interested robots and finding explainability in emergent behavior.

Amanda Prorok is an Assistant Professor (University Lecturer) in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. She serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (R-AL) and Associate Editor for Autonomous Robots (AURO). Prior to joining Cambridge, Prorok was a postdoctoral researcher at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, where she worked with Prof. Vijay Kumar. She completed her PhD at EPFL, Switzerland, with Prof. Alcherio Martinoli.

Robohub - Connecting the robotics community to the world

Multi-Robot Learning

Matt Bilsky, founder and CEO of FLX Solutions, discusses the snake-like robot he invented called the FLX BOT. The FLX BOT consists of modular links, each with a joint that can extend and rotate to get into tight spaces. Each link includes sensors including inertial measurement units and a camera. The robot is used to navigate and work in challenging environments, such as above ceilings and within walls. Matt discusses the key innovations of his product as well as his academic and entrepreneurial journey that led him to the FLX BOT.

Snake-like Robot as a Worker Companion - FLX BOT

Intel RealSense is known in the robotics community for its plug-and-play stereo cameras. These cameras make gathering 3D depth data a seamless process, with easy integrations into ROS to simplify the software development for your robots. From the RealSense team, Joel Hagberg talks about how they built this product, which allows roboticists to perform computer vision and machine learning at the edge.

Intel RealSense Enabling Computer Vision and Machine Learning At The Edge

Lilly interviews Chris Lee, a graduate student at Oregon State University. Lee explains his research on marsupial robots, or carrier-passenger pairs of heterogeneous robot systems. They discuss the possible applications of marsupial robots including the DARPA Subterranean Competition, and some of the technical challenges including optimal deployment formulated as a stochastic assignment problem.

Marsupial Robots

In this episode, we hear from Suma Reddy, CEO of Future Acres, a company focused on creating smart farming tools to reduce labor demand and increase efficiency. Suma introduces her journey into agriculture technology and the issues in current farming practices that can benefit from robotic solutions. Future Acres’s robotic harvest companion, Carry, autonomously transports crops within the farms and collects valuable data. Suma also discusses the impact of their technology so far as well as visions for the future of agricultural technology.

Autonomously Transporting Crops

Over the past decade, camera technology has made gradual, and significant improvements thanks to the mobile phone industry. This has accelerated multiple industries, including Robotics. Today, Davide Scaramuzza discusses a step-change in camera innovation that has the potential to dramatically accelerate vision-based robotics applications.

Davide Scaramuzza deep dives on Event Cameras, which operate fundamentally different from traditional cameras. Instead of sampling every pixel on an imaging sensor at a fixed frequency, the "pixels" on an event camera all operate independently, and each responds to changes in illumination. This technology unlocks a multitude of benefits, including extremely highspeed imaging, removal of the concept of "framerate", removal of data corruption due to having the sun in the sensor, reduced data throughput, and low power consumption. Tune in for more.

Event Cameras - An Evolution in Visual Data Capture

Machine Learning at the edge is gaining steam. BrainChip is accelerating this with their Akida architecture, which is mimicking the human brain by incorporating the 5 human senses on a machine learning-enabled chip.

Their chips will let roboticists and IoT developers run ML on device for low latency, low power, and low-cost machine learning-enabled products. This opens up a new product category where everyday devices can affordably become smart devices.

Mimicking the Five Senses, On Chip

ApexAI is driving advances in ROS2 to make it viable for use in autonomous vehicles. The changes they are implementing are bridging the gap between the automotive world and robotics. 

Joe Speed, VP of Product at ApexAI, dives into the current multi-year development process of bringing a car to market, and how ApexAI will transform this process into the shorter development time we see with modern technology. This technology was showcased at the Indy Autonomous Challenge where million-dollar autonomous cars raced each other on a track.

Apex.OS is a certified software framework and SDK for autonomous systems that enable software developers to write safe and certified autonomous driving applications compatible with ROS 2.

Autonomous Need for Speed

Dr. Carolyn Matl, Research Scientist at Toyota Research Institute, explains why Interactive Perception and soft tactile sensors are critical for manipulating challenging objects such as liquids, grains, and dough.

Improving Perception through Interaction

At ICRA 2022, Competitions are a core part of the conference. We shine a spotlight on influential competitions in Robotics. In this episode, Dr Liam Paull talks about the Duckietown Competition, where robots drive around Rubber Ducky passengers in an autonomous driving track.

Duckietown Competition Spotlight

Bill Smart, one fo the early ICRA Competition Chairs, dives into the high-level decisions involved with creating a meaningful competition.

Early Days of ICRA Competitions

Yu Sun, previous chair of the Robotics Grasping and Manipulation Competition, speaks on the value that this competition brought to the robotics community.

Robotics Grasping and Manipulation Competition Spotlight

Sebastian Scherer from CMU's Airlab gives us a behind-the-scenes demo at ICRA of their Autonomous Flight Control AI. Their approach aims to cooperate with human pilots and act the way they would.

They took this approach to create a more natural, less intrusive process for co-habiting human and AI pilots at a single airport. They describe it as a Turing Test, where ideally the human pilot will be unable to distinguish an AI from a person operating the plane.

Their communication system works parallel with a 6-camera hardware package based on the Nvidia AGX Dev Kit. This kit measures the angular speed of objects flying across the videos. 

In this world, high angular velocity means low risk -- since the object is flying at a fast speed perpendicular to the camera plane. 

Low angular velocity indicates high risk since the object could be flying directly at the plane, headed for a collision.

ICRA Day 1 - Autonomous Flight Technology with CMU AirLab

Underwater Autonomous Vehicles face challenging environments where GPS Navigation is rarely possible. John McConnell discusses his research, presented at ICRA 2022, into fusing overhead imagery with traditional SLAM algorithms. This research results in a more robust localization and mapping, with reduced drift commonly seen in SLAM algorithms.

Satellite imagery can be obtained for free or low cost through Google or Mapbox, creating an easily deployable framework for companies in industry to implement.

SLAM fused with Satellite Imagery (ICRA 2022)

Dr. Sihao Sun discusses his award-winning research in the area of controlling the flight of a drone when faced with a sudden rotor failure.

Controlling a Drone After Sudden Rotor Failure

Brandon Gilles, Founder and CEO of Luxonis, tells us his story about how Luxonis designed one of the most versatile perception platforms on the market. 

Brandon took the lessons learned from his time at Ubiquiti, which transformed networking with network-on-a-chip architectures, and applied the mastery of embedded hardware and software to the OAK-D camera and the broader OAK line of products.

To refer to the OAK-D as a stereovision camera tells only part of the story. Aside from depth sensing, the OAK-D leverages the Intel Myriad X to perform perception computations directly on the camera in a highly power-efficient architecture. 

Customers can also instantly leverage a wide array of open-source computer vision and AI packages that are pre-calibrated to the optics system.

Additionally, by leveraging a system-on-a-module design, the Luxonis team easily churns out a multitude of variations of the hardware platform to fit the wide variety of customer use cases. Tune in for more.

Origin Story of the OAK-D

A lot of times on our podcast we dive into startups and smaller companies in robotics. Today’s talk is unique in that Brady Watkins gives us insight into how a big company like Softbank Robotics looks into the Robotics market. 

"we think scale first, (the) difference from a startup is our goal isn't to think what's the first 10 to 20, but we need to think what's the first 20,000 look like." - Brady Watkins

Softbank: How Large Companies Approach Robotics

Prof Brendan Englot, from Stevens Institute of Technology, discusses the challenges in perception and decision-making for underwater robots – especially in the field. He discusses ongoing research using the BlueROV platform and autonomous driving simulators.

Perception and Decision-Making for Underwater Robots

Deep Learning Indaba is an organization based in South Africa that is dedicated to strengthening communities in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning across the continent of Africa.

Tune in for a Spotlight on Benjamin Rosman from ICRA 2022 on the initiatives of Deep Learning Indaba.

What does Indaba mean?
An indaba is a Zulu word for a gathering or meeting. Such meetings are held throughout southern Africa, and serve several functions: to listen and share news of members of the community, to discuss common interests and issues facing the community, and to give advice and coach others.

Building Communities Around AI in Africa

The Recycling Industry in the United States is a for-profit industry. They profit from taking recyclable material, refining it, and reselling it to companies at a cheaper price than producing the material from scratch.

If you look at the demand side of the recycling industry, an array of multi-billion dollar companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are incentivized to buy recycled goods and reduce their materials costs.

If you look at the supply side, ~300 million tons of trash are generated annually in the United States. Estimates suggest that up to 75% of that is recyclable. 

On paper, it seems clear that maximizing the amount of trash the US recycles is in everyone's interest. One issue though, less than a third of the trash ends up recycled. 

Areeb, co-founder of Glacier, breaks down the multi-layered reasoning behind why the Recycling industry is unable to handle this volume of trash, and what Glacier is doing to address this.

Recycling: An Opaque Industry

Dr. Tyler Reid, co-founder and CTO of Xona Space Systems, discusses a new type of global navigation satellite system (GNSS). Xona Space Systems plans to provide centimeter-level positioning accuracy and will serve the emerging autonomous vehicle community, where precise navigation is key. Reid discusses the advantages and technical challenges of a low Earth orbit (LEO) solution.

Precise Navigation using LEO Satellites

Many people associate prosthetic limbs with nude-colored imitations of human limbs. Something built to blend into a society where people have all of their limbs while serving functional use cases. On the other end of the spectrum are the highly optimized prosthetics used by Athletes, built for speed, low weight, and appearing nothing like a human limb. 

As a child under 12 years old, neither of these categories of prosthetics particularly speaks to you. Open Bionics, founded by Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne was started to create a third category of prosthetics. One that targets the fun, imaginative side of children, while still providing the daily functional requirements. 

Through partnerships with Disney and Lucasfilms, Open Bionics has built an array of imagination-capturing prosthetic limbs that are straight-up cool. 

Joel Gibbard dives deep in this episode into why they founded Open Bionics, and why you should invest in their company as they are getting ready to let the general public invest in them for the first time.

Going out on a Bionic Limb

Conventional sheet metal manufacturing is highly inefficient for the low-volume production seen in the space industry. At Machina Labs, they developed a novel method of forming sheet metal using two robotic arms to bend the metal into different geometries. This method cuts down the time to produce large sheet metal parts from several months down to a few hours. Ed Mehr, Co-Founder and CEO of Machina Labs, explains this revolutionary manufacturing process.

Shaking Up The Sheetmetal Industry

Nico, Emil, and Moritz founded ReRun with the mission of making powerful visualization tools free and easily accessible for roboticists. Nico and Emil talk about how these powerful tools help debug the complex problem scopes faced by roboticists.

ReRun: An Open Source Package For Powerful Visualizations

In this episode, Abate flew to Denver, Colorado, to get a behind-the-scenes look at the future of recycling with Joe Castagneri, the head of AI at Amp Robotics. With Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) processing a staggering 25 tons of trash per hour, robotic sorting is the clear long-term solution.

Recycling is a for-profit industry. When the margins don't make sense, the items will not be recycled. This is why Amp's mission to use robotics and AI to bring down the cost of recycling and increase the number of items that can be sorted for recycling is so impactful.

Deep Learning Meets Trash

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Hugh Herr, Director of the Biomechatronics Group at MIT. Herr talks about the accident that led to the amputation of both of his legs below the knee and how this shaped his rock climbing and academic career. Herr also discusses orthoses and exoskeletons developed by his research group, as well as the future of bionic technology.

http://robohub.org/human-2-0-exoskeletons-and-orthoses/

Robots - The Podcast for News and Views on Robotics

Human 2.0: Exoskeletons and Orthoses

Fotokite Phi

M-Blocks

Getting Girls Engaged in Robotics

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Ayanna Howard, Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, about her work to help children with the movement disorder cerebral palsy. Howard discusses how robots and tablet can be used to “gamify” pediatric therapy. The idea is that if therapy is fun and engaging children are more likely to do it, and thus, they are more likely to see the long-term benefits of the therapy. Howard discusses how therapy is “gamified,” how a small humanoid robot is used to coach children, and how they work with pediatricians.

http://robohub.org/robot-pediatric-coach/

Robohub Podcast

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