Robotics has the potential to magnify the skilled workforce of the nation by complementing our workforce with automation: teams of people and robots will be able to do more than either could alone. The economic engine of the U.S. runs on the productivity of our people. The rise of automation offers new opportunities to enhance the work of our citizens and drive the innovation and prosperity of our industries. Most critically, we need research to understand how future robot technologies can best complement our workforce to get the best of both human and automated labor in a collaborative team. Investments made in robotics research and workforce development will lead to increased GDP, an increased export-import ratio, a growing middle class of skilled workers, and a U.S.-based supply chain that can withstand global pandemics and other disruptions. In order to make the United States a leader in robotics, we need to invest in basic research, technology development, K-16 education, and lifelong learning.
Robotics, automation, and related Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have become pervasive bringing in concerns related to security, safety, accuracy, and trust. With growing dependency on physical robots that work in close proximity to humans, the security of these systems is becoming increasingly important to prevent cyber-attacks that could lead to privacy invasion, critical operations sabotage, and bodily harm. The current shortfall of professionals who can defend such systems demands development and integration of such a curriculum. This course description includes details about seven s…
Use-Inspired Mobile Robot to Improve Safety of Building Retrofit Workforce in Constrained Spaces
Institute for Experiential Robotics, Northeastern University（东北大学体验式机器人研究所）；Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院林肯实验室）；Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）；Amazon Scholar（亚马逊学者）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；Amazon.com, Inc.（亚马逊公司）
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…
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 introd…
Fog Robotics renders networked robots with greater mobility, on-demand compute capabilities and better energy efficiency by offloading heavy robotics workloads to nearby Edge and distant Cloud data centers. However, as the de-facto standard for implementing fog robotics applications, Robot Operating System (ROS) and its successor ROS2 fail to provide fog robots with a mobile-friendly and secure communication infrastructure. In this work, we present FogROS G, a secure routing framework that connects robotics software components from different physical locations, networks, Data Distribution Serv…
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…
The design of current natural language oriented robot architectures enables certain architectural components to circumvent moral reasoning capabilities. One example of this is reflexive generation of clarification requests as soon as referential ambiguity is detected in a human utterance. As shown in previous research, this can lead robots to (1) miscommunicate their moral dispositions and (2) weaken human perception or application of moral norms within their current context. We present a solution to these problems by performing moral reasoning on each potential disambiguation of an ambiguous …
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）；Cyberbotics（Cyberbotics公司）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；PAL Robotics（PAL机器人公司）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Agrointelli（Agrointelli公司）；Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学）
Existing Deep Learning (DL) frameworks typically do not provide ready-to-use solutions for robotics, where very specific learning, reasoning, and embodiment problems exist. Their relatively steep learning curve and the different methodologies employed by DL compared to traditional approaches, along with the high complexity of DL models, which often leads to the need of employing specialized hardware accelerators, further increase the effort and cost needed to employ DL models in robotics. Also, most of the existing DL methods follow a static inference paradigm, as inherited by the traditional …
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Instituto Superior Técnico（高等技术学院）；University of Madeira（马德拉大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic coaches promise the improved engagement of patients on rehabilitation exercises through social interaction. While previous work explored the potential of automatically monitoring exercises for AI and robotic coaches, the deployment of these systems remains a challenge. Previous work described the lack of involving stakeholders to design such functionalities as one of the major causes. In this paper, we present our efforts on eliciting the detailed design specifications on how AI and robotic coaches could interact with and guide patient's exercises in an…
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Physically-realistic simulated environments are powerful platforms for enabling measurable, replicable and statistically-robust investigation of complex robotic systems. Such environments are epitomised by the RoboCup simulation leagues, which have been successfully utilised to conduct massively-parallel experiments in topics including: optimisation of bipedal locomotion, self-localisation from noisy perception data and planning complex multi-agent strategies without direct agent-to-agent communication. Many of these systems are later transferred to physical robots, making the simulation leagu…
Edge Computing is a promising technology to provide new capabilities in technological fields that require instantaneous data processing. Researchers in areas such as machine and deep learning use extensively edge and cloud computing for their applications, mainly due to the significant computational and storage resources that they provide. Currently, Robotics is seeking to take advantage of these capabilities as well, and with the development of 5G networks, some existing limitations in the field can be overcome. In this context, it is important to know how to utilize the emerging edge archite…
Enabling Tactile Feedback for Robotic Strawberry Handling using AST Skin
Lincoln Institute of Agri-food Technology, University of Lincoln（林肯大学食品农业技术学院）；School of Computer Science, University of Lincoln（林肯大学计算机科学学院）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Collaborative human activities are grounded in social and moral norms, which humans consciously and subconsciously use to guide and constrain their decision-making and behavior, thereby strengthening their interactions and preventing emotional and physical harm. This type of norm-based processing is also critical for robots in many human-robot interaction scenarios (e.g., when helping elderly and disabled persons in assisted living facilities, or assisting humans in assembly tasks in factories or even the space station). In this position paper, we will briefly describe how several components i…
A High-frequency, Interaction-induced Pneumatic Oscillator Enabling Versatile Soft Robotics
Beijing University of Chemical Technology（北京化工大学）；Ritsumeikan University（立命馆大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Dyson Robotics Lab, Imperial College London（戴森机器人实验室，帝国理工学院）
Despite the success of reinforcement learning methods, they have yet to have their breakthrough moment when applied to a broad range of robotic manipulation tasks. This is partly due to the fact that reinforcement learning algorithms are notoriously difficult and time consuming to train, which is exacerbated when training from images rather than full-state inputs. As humans perform manipulation tasks, our eyes closely monitor every step of the process with our gaze focusing sequentially on the objects being manipulated. With this in mind, we present our Attention-driven Robotic Manipulation (A…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Swarm robotics has experienced a rapid expansion in recent years, primarily fueled by specialized multi-robot systems developed to achieve dedicated collective actions. These specialized platforms are in general designed with swarming considerations at the front and center. Key hardware and software elements required for swarming are often deeply embedded and integrated with the particular system. However, given the noticeable increase in the number of low-cost mobile robots readily available, practitioners and hobbyists may start considering to assemble full-fledged swarms by minimally retrof…
On Fulfilling the Exigent Need for Automating and Modernizing Logistics Infrastructure in India: Enabling AI-based Integration, Digitalization, and Smart Automation of Industrial Parks and Robotic Warehouses
TECNALIA, Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA)（TECNALIA，巴斯克研究与技术联盟）；University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU)（巴斯克国家大学）；Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group (RSAIT)（机器人与自主系统组）
University of Genova（热那亚大学）；Italian Institute of Technology（意大利理工学院）
As robotic technology advances, the barriers to the coexistence of humans and robots are slowly coming down. Application domains like elderly care, collaborative manufacturing, collaborative manipulation, etc., are considered the need of the hour, and progress in robotics holds the potential to address many societal challenges. The future socio-technical systems constitute of blended workforce with a symbiotic relationship between human and robot partners working collaboratively. This thesis attempts to address some of the research challenges in enabling human-robot collaboration. In particula…
NanoSLAM: Enabling Fully Onboard SLAM for Tiny Robots
Integrated Systems Laboratory of ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院集成系统实验室）；Center for Project-Based Learning of ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院项目导向学习中心）；Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering of University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学电子、电子与信息工程系）
Affordance Field Intervention: Enabling VLAs to Escape Memory Traps in Robotic Manipulation
School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；John Hopcropt Center for Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学中心）
AdaptPNP: Integrating Prehensile and Non-Prehensile Skills for Adaptive Robotic Manipulation
School of Computing, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学计算机学院）；RoboScience（机器人科学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Edge computing is becoming more and more popular among researchers who seek to take advantage of the edge resources and the minimal time delays, in order to run their robotic applications more efficiently. Recently, many edge architectures have been proposed, each of them having their advantages and disadvantages, depending on each application. In this work, we present two different edge architectures for controlling the trajectory of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The first architecture is based on docker containers and the second one is based on kubernetes, while the main framework for op…
High performance lidars are essential in autonomous robots such as self-driving cars, automated ground vehicles and intelligent machines. Traditional mechanical scanning lidars offer superior performance in autonomous vehicles, but the potential mass application is limited by the inherent manufacturing difficulty. We propose a robotic lidar sensor based on incommensurable scanning that allows straightforward mass production and adoption in autonomous robots. Some unique features are additionally permitted by this incommensurable scanning. Similar to the fovea in human retina, this lidar featur…
CoLRIO: LiDAR-Ranging-Inertial Centralized State Estimation for Robotic Swarms
School of Systems Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学系统科学与工程学院）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Many robotic applications that are critical for robot performance require immediate feedback, hence execution time is a critical concern. Furthermore, it is common that robots come with a fixed quantity of hardware resources; if an application requires more computational resources than the robot can accommodate, its onboard execution might be extended to a degree that degrades the robot performance. Cloud computing, on the other hand, features on-demand computational resources; by enabling robots to leverage those resources, application execution time can be reduced. The key to enabling robot …
We propose a parallel massage robot with compliant joints based on the series elastic actuator (SEA), offering a unified force-position control approach. First, the kinematic and static force models are established for obtaining the corresponding control variables. Then, a novel force-position control strategy is proposed to separately control the force-position along the normal direction of the surface and another two-direction displacement, without the requirement of a robotic dynamics model. To evaluate its performance, we implement a series of robotic massage experiments. The results demon…
