In contrast to manned missions, the application of autonomous robots for space exploration missions decreases the safety concerns of the exploration missions while extending the exploration distance since returning transportation is not necessary for robotics missions. In addition, the employment of robots in these missions also decreases mission complexities and costs because there is no need for onboard life support systems: robots can withstand and operate in harsh conditions, for instance, extreme temperature, pressure, and radiation, where humans cannot survive. In this article, we introduce environments on Mars, review the existing autonomous driving techniques deployed on Earth, as well as explore technologies required to enable future commercial autonomous space robotic explorers. Last but not least, we also present that one of the urgent technical challenges for autonomous space explorers, namely, computing power onboard.
C$^2$-Explorer: Contiguity-Driven Task Allocation with Connectivity-Aware Task Representation for Decentralized Multi-UAV Exploration
School of Intelligence Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China（哈尔滨工业大学深圳研究院）；Robotics and Autonomous Systems Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州）机器人与自主系统方向）；Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China（南方科技大学机械与能源工程系）
Cyberbotics Ltd. develops WebotsTM, a mobile robotics simulation software that provides you with a rapid prototyping environment for modelling, programming and simulating mobile robots. The provided robot libraries enable you to transfer your control programs to several commercially available real mobile robots. WebotsTM lets you define and modify a complete mobile robotics setup, even several different robots sharing the same environment. For each object, you can define a number of properties, such as shape, color, texture, mass, friction, etc. You can equip each robot with a large number of …
This paper shows the potential of a Lego\c{opyright} based low-cost commercial robotic platform for learning and testing prototypes in higher education and research. The overall setup aims to explain mobile robotic issues strongly related to several fields such as Mechatronics, Robotics, and Automatic Control theory. The capabilities and limitations of LEGO robots are studied within two projects. The first one involves a robotic vehicle which is able to follow several predefined paths. The second project concerns to the classical problem of position control. Algorithms and additional tools hav…
We introduce UltraBots, a system that combines ultrasound haptic feedback and robotic actuation for large-area mid-air haptics for VR. Ultrasound haptics can provide precise mid-air haptic feedback and versatile shape rendering, but the interaction area is often limited by the small size of the ultrasound devices, restricting the possible interactions for VR. To address this problem, this paper introduces a novel approach that combines robotic actuation with ultrasound haptics. More specifically, we will attach ultrasound transducer arrays to tabletop mobile robots or robotic arms for scalable…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；PerceptIn Inc（佩塞普特因公司）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Recent researches on robotics have shown significant improvement, spanning from algorithms, mechanics to hardware architectures. Robotics, including manipulators, legged robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles, are now widely applied in diverse scenarios. However, the high computation and data complexity of robotic algorithms pose great challenges to its applications. On the one hand, CPU platform is flexible to handle multiple robotic tasks. GPU platform has higher computational capacities and easy-touse development frameworks, so they have been widely adopted in several applications. On the …
Developing Flying Explorer for Autonomous Digital Modelling in Wild Unknowns
College of Civil Aviation, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学民航学院）；College of Engineering, South China Agriculture University（华南农业大学工程学院）
Exploration of unknown environments is an important challenge in the field of robotics. While a single robot can achieve this task alone, evidence suggests it could be accomplished more efficiently by groups of robots, with advantages in terms of terrain coverage as well as robustness to failures. Exploration can be guided through belief maps, which provide probabilistic information about which part of the terrain is interesting to explore (either based on risk management or reward). This process can be centrally coordinated by building a collective belief map on a common server. However, rely…
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）；Centre for Research and Technology Hellas（希腊研究与技术中心）
This paper presents a comprehensive review of ground agricultural robotic systems and applications with special focus on harvesting that span research and commercial products and results, as well as their enabling technologies. The majority of literature concerns the development of crop detection, field navigation via vision and their related challenges. Health monitoring, yield estimation, water status inspection, seed planting and weed removal are frequently encountered tasks. Regarding robotic harvesting, apples, strawberries, tomatoes and sweet peppers are mainly the crops considered in pu…
Efficient robotic exploration of unknown, sensor limited, global-information-deficient environments poses unique challenges to path planning algorithms. In these difficult environments, no deterministic guarantees on path completion and mission success can be made in general. Integrated Exploration (IE), which strives to combine localization and exploration, must be solved in order to create an autonomous robotic system capable of long term operation in new and challenging environments. This paper formulates a probabilistic framework which allows the creation of exploration algorithms providin…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；Siemens Healthineers（西门子医疗）
Tendon-sheath-driven manipulators (TSM) are widely used in minimally invasive surgical systems due to their long, thin shape, flexibility, and compliance making them easily steerable in narrow or tortuous environments. Many commercial TSM-based medical devices have non-linear phenomena resulting from their composition such as backlash hysteresis and dead zone, which lead to a considerable challenge for achieving precise control of the end effector pose. However, many recent works in the literature do not consider the combined effects and compensation of these phenomena, and less focus on pract…
In this second of three short papers, I introduce some of the basic concepts of space robotics with an emphasis on some specific challenging areas of research that are peculiar to the application of robotics to space infrastructure development. The style of these short papers is pedagogical and the concepts in this paper are developed from fundamental manipulator robotics. This second paper considers the application of space manipulators to on-orbit servicing (OOS), an application which has considerable commercial application. I provide some background to the notion of robotic on-orbit servici…
Mechanizing the manual harvesting of fresh market fruits constitutes one of the biggest challenges to the sustainability of the fruit industry. During manual harvesting of some fresh-market crops like strawberries and table grapes, pickers spend significant amounts of time walking to carry full trays to a collection station at the edge of the field. A step toward increasing harvest automation for such crops is to deploy harvest-aid collaborative robots (co-bots) that transport the empty and full trays, thus increasing harvest efficiency by reducing pickers' non-productive walking times. This w…
Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克布拉格技术大学）；Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学）
This paper presents a self-contained system for the robust utilization of aerial robots in the autonomous exploration of cave environments to help human explorers, first responders, and speleologists. The proposed system is generally applicable to an arbitrary exploration task within an unknown and unstructured subterranean environment and interconnects crucial robotic subsystems to provide full autonomy of the robots. Such subsystems primarily include mapping, path and trajectory planning, localization, control, and decision making. Due to the diversity, complexity, and structural uncertainty…
A large number of robotic and human-assisted missions to the Moon and Mars are forecast. NASA's efforts to learn about the geology and makeup of these celestial bodies rely heavily on the use of robotic arms. The safety and redundancy aspects will be crucial when humans will be working alongside the robotic explorers. Additionally, robotic arms are crucial to satellite servicing and planned orbit debris mitigation missions. The goal of this work is to create a custom Computer Vision (CV) based Artificial Neural Network (ANN) that would be able to rapidly identify the posture of a 7 Degree of F…
From Pixels to Shelf: An Integrated Robotic System for Autonomous Supermarket Stocking with a Mobile Manipulator
Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova（帕多瓦大学信息工程系）；Division of Decision and Control Systems, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（皇家理工学院电气工程与计算机科学学院决策与控制系统系）；Animum AB（Animum公司）
The migration of robots from the laboratory into sensitive home settings as commercially available therapeutic agents represents a significant transition for information privacy and ethical imperatives. We present new privacy paradigms and apply the Fair Information Practices (FIPs) to investigate concerns unique to the placement of therapeutic robots in private home contexts. We then explore the importance and utility of research ethics as operationalized by existing human subjects research frameworks to guide the consideration of therapeutic robotic users -- a step vital to the continued res…
Recognizing objects in dense clutter accurately plays an important role to a wide variety of robotic manipulation tasks including grasping, packing, rearranging and many others. However, conventional visual recognition models usually miss objects because of the significant occlusion among instances and causes incorrect prediction due to the visual ambiguity with the high object crowdedness. In this paper, we propose an interactive exploration framework called Smart Explorer for recognizing all objects in dense clutters. Our Smart Explorer physically interacts with the clutter to maximize the r…
The exploration of asteroids and comets is important in the quest for the formation of the Solar System and it is an important step for human space travel. Moving on the surface of asteroids is challenging for future robotic explorers due to the weak gravity force. In this research, an approach that is based on a new kind of jumping rovers is presented. This robotic platform has internal masses and by spinning up these flywheels and suddenly stopping them, it is feasible to perform a hop from a few meters up to hundreds of meters. In contrast to related works where robotic explorers usually st…
The Pepper robot has become a widely recognised face for the perceived potential of social robots to enter our homes and businesses. However, to date, commercial and research applications of the Pepper have been largely restricted to roles in which the robot is able to remain stationary. This restriction is the result of a number of technical limitations, including limited sensing capabilities, and have as a result, reduced the number of roles in which use of the robot can be explored. In this paper, we present our approach to solving these problems, with the intention of opening up new resear…
Laminate mechanisms are a reliable concept in producing lowcost robots for educational and commercial purposes. These mechanisms are produced using low-cost manufacturing techniques which have improved significantly during recent years and are more accessible to novices and hobbyists. However, iterating through the design space to come up with the best design for a robot is still a time consuming and rather expensive task and therefore, there is still a need for model-based analysis before manufacturing. Until now, there has been no integrated design and analysis software for laminate robots. …
Many have explored the application of continuum robot manipulators for minimally invasive surgery, and have successfully demonstrated the advantages their flexible design provides -- with some solutions having reached commercialisation and clinical practice. However, the usual high complexity and closed-nature of such designs has traditionally restricted the shared development of continuum robots across the research area, thus impacting further progress and the solution of open challenges. In order to close this gap, this paper introduces ENDO, an open-source 3-segment continuum robot manipula…
Open-Source, Cost-Aware Kinematically Feasible Planning for Mobile and Surface Robotics
Open Navigation LLC；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Locus Robotics；QUT Centre for Robotics and School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics（QUT机器人中心和电气工程与机器人学院）
MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Applied Ocean Science and Engineering（麻省理工学院-伍兹霍尔海洋学研究所应用海洋科学与工程联合项目）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)（麻省理工学院）；Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)（伍兹霍尔海洋学研究所）
We present a novel POMDP problem formulation for a robot that must autonomously decide where to go to collect new and scientifically relevant images given a limited ability to communicate with its human operator. From this formulation we derive constraints and design principles for the observation model, reward model, and communication strategy of such a robot, exploring techniques to deal with the very high-dimensional observation space and scarcity of relevant training data. We introduce a novel active reward learning strategy based on making queries to help the robot minimize path "regret" …
Institute for Software and Systems Engineering, University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学软件与系统工程研究所）；KUKA Roboter GmbH（库卡机器人有限公司）；MRK-Systeme GmbH（MRK系统有限公司）
Most commercial manufacturers of industrial robots require their robots to be programmed in a proprietary language tailored to the domain - a typical domain-specific language (DSL). However, these languages oftentimes suffer from shortcomings such as controller-specific design, limited expressiveness and a lack of extensibility. For that reason, we developed the extensible Robotics API for programming industrial robots on top of a general-purpose language. Although being a very flexible approach to programming industrial robots, a fully-fledged language can be too complex for simple tasks. Add…
Autonomous Robotic Tissue Palpation and Abnormalities Characterisation via Ergodic Exploration
Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento（信息工程与计算机科学系，特伦托大学）；Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Trento（工业工程系，特伦托大学）
This paper presents a practical approach towards implementing pathfinding algorithms on real-world and low-cost non- commercial hardware platforms. While using robotics simulation platforms as a test-bed for our algorithms we easily overlook real- world exogenous problems that are developed by external factors. Such problems involve robot wheel slips, asynchronous motors, abnormal sensory data or unstable power sources. The real-world dynamics tend to be very painful even for executing simple algorithms like a Wavefront planner or A-star search. This paper addresses designing techniques that t…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Google（谷歌）
Exploration of unknown environments is a fundamental problem in robotics and an essential component in numerous applications of autonomous systems. A major challenge in exploring unknown environments is that the robot has to plan with the limited information available at each time step. While most current approaches rely on heuristics and assumption to plan paths based on these partial observations, we instead propose a novel way to integrate deep learning into exploration by leveraging 3D scene completion for informed, safe, and interpretable exploration mapping and planning. Our approach, SC…
Human assistive robotics have the potential to help the elderly and individuals living with disabilities with their Activities of Daily Living (ADL). Robotics researchers present bottom up solutions using various control methods for different types of movements. Health research on the other hand focuses on clinical assessment and rehabilitation leaving arguably important differences between the two domains. In particular, little is known quantitatively on what ADLs humans perform in their everyday environment - at home, work etc. This information can help guide development and prioritization o…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；NASA Goddard Space Flight Center（美国国家航空航天局戈达德太空飞行中心）
Motivated by lunar exploration, we consider deploying a network of mobile robots to explore an unknown environment while acting as a cooperative positioning system. Robots measure and communicate position-related data in order to perform localization in the absence of infrastructure-based solutions (e.g. stationary beacons or GPS). We present Trilateration for Exploration and Mapping (TEAM), a novel algorithm for low-complexity localization and mapping with robotic networks. TEAM is designed to leverage the capability of commercially-available ultra-wideband (UWB) radios on board the robots to…
Dormant season grapevine pruning requires skilled seasonal workers during the winter season which are becoming less available. As workers hasten to prune more vines in less time amid to the short-term seasonal hiring culture and low wages, vines are often pruned inconsistently leading to imbalanced grapevines. In addition to this, currently existing mechanical methods cannot selectively prune grapevines and manual follow-up operations are often required that further increase production cost. In this paper, we present the design and field evaluation of a rugged, and fully autonomous robot for e…
Fillet welding is one of the most widespread types of welding in the industry, which is still carried out manually or automated by contact. This paper aims to describe an online programming system for noncontact fillet welding robots with U and L shaped structures, which responds to the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In this paper, the authors propose an online robot programming methodology that eliminates unnecessary steps traditionally performed in robotic welding, so that the operator only performs three steps to complete the welding task. First, choose the piece to weld. Then, …
NVIDIA（英伟达）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Robotic cutting of soft materials is critical for applications such as food processing, household automation, and surgical manipulation. As in other areas of robotics, simulators can facilitate controller verification, policy learning, and dataset generation. Moreover, differentiable simulators can enable gradient-based optimization, which is invaluable for calibrating simulation parameters and optimizing controllers. In this work, we present DiSECt: the first differentiable simulator for cutting soft materials. The simulator augments the finite element method (FEM) with a continuous contact m…
Smartphones and robots can have an adversarial or a symbiotic relationship because they strive to serve overlapping customer needs. While smartphones are prevalent, humanoid robots are not. Even though considerable public and private resources are being invested in developing and commercializing humanoid robots, progress seems stalled and no humanoid robot can be said to be successful with consumers. A part from the obvious engineering differences between humanoids and smartphones, other economic factors influence this situation. On one hand, the product cycle of robots is slower than smartpho…
Can a Robot Walk the Robotic Dog: Triple-Zero Collaborative Navigation for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems
Yuanpei College, Peking University（北京大学元培学院）；School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）；School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学计算机学院）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Beijing Jinruyi Large Model Technology Co., Ltd.（北京金如意大模型科技有限公司）
Do Robots Really Need Anthropomorphic Hands? A Comparison of Human and Robotic Hands
Robotics Innovation Center, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI)（德意志人工智能研究中心机器人创新中心）；Leibniz Universität Hannover, L3S Research Center（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学L3S研究中心）
Mining beyond Earth with Space Robots: Exploration, Sampling, and Extraction
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；OpenSpace Lab（OpenSpace实验室）；School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学计算、信息与技术学院）；University Research and Innovation Center, Obuda University（欧布达大学大学研究与创新中心）；School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学机械工程及自动化学院）；School of Earth and Space Sciences, Wuhan University（武汉大学地球与空间科学学院）；Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学数学与计算机科学学院）；School of Architecture & Urban Planning, Shenzhen University（深圳大学建筑与城市规划学院）；School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, China University of Mining and（中国矿业大学机电工程学院）
University of Colorado, Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Robotic Materials Inc.（机器人材料公司）
We present algorithms and results for a robotic manipulation system that was designed to be easily programmable and adaptable to various tasks common to industrial setting, which is inspired by the Industrial Assembly Challenge at the 2018 World Robotics Summit in Tokyo. This challenge included assembly of standard, commercially available industrial parts into 2D and 3D assemblies. We demonstrate three tasks that can be classified into "peg-in-hole" and "hole-on-peg" tasks and identify two canonical algorithms: spiral-based search and tilting insertion. Both algorithms use hand-coded threshold…
