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environments

The Importance of Steel Quality Control in Robotics Production: Ensuring Safety and Reliability

May 8, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

As the demand for robotics continues to grow in various sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, and service industries, the need for high-quality materials in their production has become more critical than ever.

Ensuring the safety and reliability of these machines is a top priority, and one of the key factors contributing to this is the quality of steel used in their construction.

This blog post will explore the importance of steel quality control in robotics production, highlighting six reasons why it’s essential for ensuring the safety and reliability of these advanced technologies. [Read more…] about The Importance of Steel Quality Control in Robotics Production: Ensuring Safety and Reliability

Filed Under: Materials Tagged With: control, ensuring, environments, harsh, high-quality, machines, production, quality, reliability, robotics, robots, safety, steel

Drones navigate unseen environments with liquid neural networks

April 26, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

MIT researchers exhibit a new advancement in autonomous drone navigation, using brain-inspired liquid neural networks that excel in out-of-distribution scenarios

In the vast, expansive skies where birds once ruled supreme, a new crop of aviators is taking flight. These pioneers of the air are not living creatures, but rather a product of deliberate innovation: drones.

But these aren’t your typical flying bots, humming around like mechanical bees. Rather, they’re avian-inspired marvels that soar through the sky, guided by liquid neural networks to navigate ever-changing and unseen environments with precision and ease.

Inspired by the adaptable nature of organic brains, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory introduced a method for robust flight navigation agents to master vision-based fly-to-target tasks in intricate, unfamiliar environments. [Read more…] about Drones navigate unseen environments with liquid neural networks

Filed Under: Drones, Features Tagged With: adapt, air, applications, autonomous, csail, data, drone, drones, environments, flying, learning, liquid, making, mit, navigation, networks, neural, researchers, robust, scenarios, systems, task, tasks, training

Avidbots releases first floorscrubbing robot built for industrial spaces

April 24, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Avidbots, a robotics company, has launched its first cleaning robot, Neo 2W, describing it as having been “designed specifically for warehouses and manufacturing environments to improve cleaning quality, efficiency and productivity”.

Warehouses and factories present unique and challenging environments for robots, given floor debris, dynamic activity, and frequent layout changes.

In collaboration with industrial customers, Avidbots developed Neo 2W to alleviate common issues, resulting in a more consistent clean with less downtime and unnecessary human intervention. [Read more…] about Avidbots releases first floorscrubbing robot built for industrial spaces

Filed Under: News, Service robots Tagged With: advanced, avidbots, challenging, clean, cleaning, companies, customers, debris, deliver, environments, features, floor, industrial, neo, robot, unique, warehouse

ABD partners with Jevons Robotics to further automate industrial vehicles

February 13, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

ABD Solutions has signed an agreement with Jevons Robotics to integrate Indigo Drive – a full stack system of autonomy and communications – with Jevons Robotics’ suite of automation-enabled industrial electric vehicles.

These vehicles will be operated automatically and supervised from a central control room improving safety and streamlining the mining process, both operationally and financially.

Todd Peate, CEO of Jevons Robotics, says: “We are delighted to announce a long-term partnership with ABD Solutions, a globally regarded automation company with substantial experience working with autonomous mining solution providers. [Read more…] about ABD partners with Jevons Robotics to further automate industrial vehicles

Filed Under: Autonomous vehicles, News Tagged With: abd, agreement, automation, drive, electric, employee, environments, experience, hazardous, indigo, jevons, long-term, mining, partnership, peate, robotics, safety, solution, solutions, system, vehicles, working

Apptronik and Terex to jointly develop robots for commercial use

February 7, 2023 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

Apptronik, a maker of general-purpose robots, exoskeletons and humanoids, has received an equity investment from Terex Corporation and has reached an agreement with Terex to co-develop “first-of-a-kind robots” to work alongside workers to support safety, productivity, and efficiency of industries that power the economy and are essential to building infrastructure.

Robots have long held the promise of solving labor shortages and productivity issues, but until recently have been limited to performing repetitive tasks within structured environments such as warehouses or factories.

While robots have proven useful at completing dull and repetitive tasks in controlled environments, they have not been leveraged for more complex tasks in unstructured environments. [Read more…] about Apptronik and Terex to jointly develop robots for commercial use

Filed Under: Humanoids, News Tagged With: agreement, apptronik, ceo, commercial, complex, enable, environments, factories, industries, leveraged, logistics, nasa, productivity, robotics, robots, tasks, terex, unstructured, warehouses, work

Intel Labs introduces SPEAR: An open-source photorealistic simulator for embodied AI

December 25, 2022 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

By Mike Roberts, a research scientist at Intel Labs, where he works on using photorealistic synthetic data for computer vision applications

Interactive simulators are becoming powerful tools for training embodied artificial intelligence (AI) systems, but existing simulators have limited content diversity, physical interactivity, and visual fidelity.

To better serve the embodied AI developer community, Intel Labs has collaborated with the Computer Vision Center in Spain, Kujiale in China, and the Technical University of Munich to develop the Simulator for Photorealistic Embodied AI Research (SPEAR).

This highly realistic simulation platform helps developers to accelerate the training and validation of embodied agents for a growing set of tasks and domains.

With its large collection of photorealistic indoor environments, SPEAR applies to a wide range of household navigation and manipulation tasks. Ultimately, SPEAR aims to drive research and commercial applications in household robotics and manufacturing, including human-robot interaction scenarios and digital twin applications.

Figure 1. Scenes may be cluttered with objects that can be manipulated individually. A strong impulse can be applied to all objects at the start of the simulation to create the disordered environment. Messy room configurations could serve as initial states for a cleaning task.

To create SPEAR, Intel Labs worked closely with a team of professional artists for over a year to construct a collection of high-quality, handcrafted, interactive environments. Currently, SPEAR features a starter pack of 300 virtual indoor environments with more than 2,500 rooms and 17,000 objects that can be manipulated individually.

These interactive training environments use detailed geometry, photorealistic materials, realistic physics, and accurate lighting. New content packs targeting industrial and healthcare domains will be released soon.

By offering larger, more diverse, and realistic environments, SPEAR helps throughout the development cycle of embodied AI systems, and enables training robust agents to operate in the real world, potentially even straight from simulation.

SPEAR helps to improve accuracy on many embodied AI tasks, especially traversing and rearranging cluttered indoor environments. Ultimately, SPEAR aims to decrease the time to market for household robotics and smart warehouse applications, and increase the spatial intelligence of embodied agents.

Challenges in Training and Validating Embodied AI Systems

In the field of embodied AI, agents learn by interacting with different variables in the physical world. However, capturing and compiling these interactions into training data can be time consuming, labor intensive, and potentially dangerous.

In response to this challenge, the embodied AI community has developed a variety of interactive simulators, where robots can be trained and validated in simulation before being deployed in the physical world.

While existing simulators have enabled rapid progress on increasingly complex and open-ended real-world tasks such as point-goal and object navigation, object manipulation, and autonomous driving, these sims have several limitations.

Simulators that use artist-created environments typically provide a limited selection of unique scenes, such as a few dozen homes or a few hundred isolated rooms, which can lead to severe over-fitting and poor sim-to-real transfer performance.

On the other hand, simulators that use scanned 3D environments provide larger collections of scenes, but offer little or no interactivity with objects.

In addition, both types of simulators offer limited visual fidelity, either because it is too labor intensive to author high-resolution art assets, or because of 3D scanning artifacts.

Figure 2. SPEAR enables embodied AI developers to train a navigation policy on an OpenBot entirely in simulation.

Overview of SPEAR

SPEAR was designed based on three main requirements:

  1. support a collection of environments that is as large, diverse, and high-quality as possible;
  2. provide sufficient physical realism to support realistic interactions with a wide range of household objects; and
  3. offer as much photorealism as possible, while still maintaining enough rendering speed to support training complex embodied agent behaviors.

Motivated by these requirements, SPEAR was implemented on top of the Unreal Engine, which is an industrial-strength open-source game engine. SPEAR environments are implemented as Unreal Engine assets, and SPEAR provides an OpenAI Gym interface to interact with environments via Python.

Figure 3. The LoCoBot Agent is suitable for both navigation and manipulation in simulation. This agent’s realistic gripper makes it ideal for rearrangement tasks.

SPEAR currently supports four distinct embodied agents:

  • The OpenBot Agent provides identical image observations to a real-world OpenBot, implements an identical control interface, and has been modeled with accurate geometry and physical parameters. It is well-suited for sim-to-real experiments.
  • The Fetch Agent and LoCoBot Agent have also been modeled using accurate geometry and physical parameters, and each has a physically realistic gripper. These agents are ideal for rearrangement tasks.
  • The Camera Agent can be teleported anywhere, making it useful for collecting static datasets.

Figure 3. The LoCoBot Agent is suitable for both navigation and manipulation in simulation. This agent’s realistic gripper makes it ideal for rearrangement tasks.

By default, agents return photorealistic egocentric observations from camera sensors, as well as wheel encoder states and joint encoder states. Additionally, agents can optionally return several types of privileged information.

First, agents can return a sequence of waypoints representing the shortest path to a goal location, as well as GPS and compass observations that point directly to the goal, both of which can be useful when defining navigation tasks.

Second, agents can return pixel-perfect semantic segmentation and depth images, which can be useful when controlling for the effects of imperfect perception in downstream embodied tasks and collecting static datasets.

SPEAR currently supports two distinct tasks:

  • The Point-Goal Navigation Task randomly selects a goal position in the scene’s reachable space, computes a reward based on the agent’s distance to the goal, and triggers the end of an episode when the agent hits an obstacle or the goal.
  • The Freeform Task is an empty placeholder task that is useful for collecting static datasets.

SPEAR is available under an open-source MIT license, ready for customization on any hardware. For more details, visit the SPEAR GitHub page.

Filed Under: Features, Science Tagged With: agent, agents, ai, embodied, environments, goal, navigation, objects, photorealistic, physical, realistic, simulation, simulators, spear, tasks, training

Ottonomy robots to provide customer services at Pittsburgh airport

November 28, 2022 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Pittsburgh International Airport is teaming up with tech startup Ottonomy and its fully autonomous delivery robot – Ottobot – for a pilot project offering select passengers a contactless delivery system.

Ottonomy is partnering with PIT’s xBridge Innovation Center, the airport’s tech proving ground for technologies and startups that provide solutions for the industry and beyond.

Drawing from the region’s strong innovation economy, the airport is a proof-of-concept site for technologies in a real-world operating environment as well as a pilot site for companies’ first deployments. [Read more…] about Ottonomy robots to provide customer services at Pittsburgh airport

Filed Under: Infrastructure, News Tagged With: airport, airports, autonomous, delivery, deployments, environment, environments, fully, innovation, multiple, ottobot, ottobots, ottonomy, pit, pittsburgh, real-world, robots, site, solutions, system, technologies, technology, xbridge

Trimble and Exyn Technologies launch autonomous construction surveying technology

November 14, 2022 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Industrial technology company Trimble and Exyn Technologies, a developer of multi-platform robotic autonomy for complex, GPS-denied environments, have agreed a strategic collaboration to explore the use of autonomous construction surveying technology.

The solution will integrate Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot, the ExynPak powered by ExynAI and the Trimble X7 total station. It will enable fully autonomous missions inside complex and dynamic construction environments, which can result in consistent and precise reality capture for production and quality control workflows.

Aviad Almagor, vice president of technology innovation, Trimble, says: “The integration of autonomous surveying technology into a construction workflow has groundbreaking potential. [Read more…] about Trimble and Exyn Technologies launch autonomous construction surveying technology

Filed Under: Industry, News Tagged With: autonomous, capture, collaboration, construction, data, efficiency, enable, environment, environments, exyn, exynai, integration, map, missions, powered, quality, result, robot, safety, surveying, technologies, technology, trimble

Auve Tech launches new generation self-driving vehicle

October 27, 2022 by Sam Francis Leave a Comment

Estonian company Auve Tech has launched a new generation self-driving vehicle.

MiCa is the latest self-driving shuttle from Auve Tech, which specializes in developing and producing autonomous vehicles.

The startup says MiCa takes safety, practicality and self-driving to “a new level” and allows autonomous driving in various weather and traffic conditions. [Read more…] about Auve Tech launches new generation self-driving vehicle

Filed Under: Autonomous vehicles, News Tagged With: allows, areas, autonomous, auve, conditions, countries, developing, driving, environments, estonian, generation, helps, last mile, mica, passengers, provide, public, safety, self-driving, tech, transport, vehicle, vehicles, weather

Aerobotix partners with FerRobotics to develop ‘first-of-its-kind’ end-of-arm-tool automated sander for flammable dust

September 15, 2022 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

Aerobotix and FerRobotics, two robotics companies based in the US and Austria respectively, have partnered to create what they say is the first Class II, Division 1 (C2D1) End of Arm Tool (EOAT) automated sander.

Meeting industry demand for a hazardous-environment solution that will achieve time and cost efficiencies, and enable much safer work environments, this special orbital sander – based on the industry-proven Active Orbital Kit (AOK) with patented Active Compliant Technology – lessens human involvement in hazardous tasks.

Each year, according to the International Labour Organization, tens of millions of workers globally are afflicted with silicosis, an incurable lung disease caused by crystalline silica dust inhalation, leading to thousands of deaths. [Read more…] about Aerobotix partners with FerRobotics to develop ‘first-of-its-kind’ end-of-arm-tool automated sander for flammable dust

Filed Under: Industrial robots, News Tagged With: active, aerobotix, aerospace, automated, combustible, created, defense, disease, dust, environments, equipment, ferrobotics, hazardous, human, ignited, industries, involvement, lung, orbital, sander, sanding, tasks, tool

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