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simulation

Ready Robotics ‘making robotics system design easier’ for non-programmers

May 24, 2023 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

Robotics hardware traditionally requires programmers to deploy it. Ready Robotics wants to change that with its “no code” software aimed at people working in manufacturing who haven’t got programming skills.

The Columbus, Ohio, startup is a spinout of robotics research from Johns Hopkins University. Kel Guerin was a PhD candidate there leading this research when he partnered with Benjamin Gibbs, who was at Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, to land funding and pursue the company, now led by Gibbs as CEO.

Guerin, who’s now chief innovation officer at the startup, says: “There was this a-ha moment where we figured out that we could take these types of visual languages that are very easy to understand and use them for robotics.” [Read more…] about Ready Robotics ‘making robotics system design easier’ for non-programmers

Filed Under: Computing, Features Tagged With: allows, apps, automation, canvas, code, company, deploy, design, drag-and-drop, forgeos, guerin, hardware, interface, isaac, manufacturing, non-programmers, offers, omniverse, programming, ready, real, robot, robotic, robotics, robots, simulation, startup, system, systems, task, users, working

RoboDK partners with Force Technology and Hexagon to make gears easier to repair

May 18, 2023 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

Force Technology, a Danish technology consultancy and service company, has completed in partnership with Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence and RoboDK . The companies describe it as “a revolutionary project” focused on making gear repair a more sustainable process for manufacturers.

The purpose of the project was to improve laser welding procedures and determine if sustainable gear repair was possible using robot toolpath programming, digital twin, simulation, and post-processing.

Improving this practical application with robot simulation reveals a sustainable gear repair process that can guarantee high-quality results. [Read more…] about RoboDK partners with Force Technology and Hexagon to make gears easier to repair

Filed Under: News, Software Tagged With: additive, force, gear, gears, hexagon, laser, manufacturing, process, programming, project, repair, robodk, robot, service, simulation, software, sustainable, technology, time, toolpath

Generative design: nTopology blazing a trail through 3D printing world

May 17, 2023 by Abdul Montaqim Leave a Comment

One of the most impressive features of the nTopology design application is that it requires substantially less computing power. According to the company’s – and its partners’ – calculations, file sizes can be 99 percent smaller compared with traditional 3D design software. 

Traditional, long-established software for 3D design tends to be very memory-hungry and can seriously stress out processors. nTop, on the other hand, can provide the same functionality if used on a laptop as traditional 3D design applications would if run on a supercomputer – because nTop was specifically designed for today’s 3D printing and design requirements.

The way nTop does this is difficult to explain for a non-technical journalist, but essentially, the nTop software does away with such things as extrusion, which is a fundamental concept and requirement in traditional 3D design applications. [Read more…] about Generative design: nTopology blazing a trail through 3D printing world

Filed Under: Design, Features Tagged With: cad, complex, component, design, geometry, lattice, manufacturing, materials, ntop, parts, people, printing, process, simulation, software, there's, things, traditional

MIT scientists find new way to help robots handle fluids

May 15, 2023 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

Researchers create new simulation tool for robots to manipulate complex fluids in a step towards helping robots more effortlessly assist with daily tasks that deal with liquids

Imagine you’re enjoying a picnic by a riverbank on a windy day. (Why you chose to do this on a windy day was your own poor decision).

A gust of wind accidentally catches your paper napkin and lands on the water’s surface, quickly drifting away from you. You grab a nearby stick and carefully agitate the water to retrieve it, creating a series of small waves.

These waves eventually push the napkin back towards the shore, so you grab it. In this scenario, the water acts as a medium for transmitting forces, enabling you to manipulate the position of the napkin without direct contact. [Read more…] about MIT scientists find new way to help robots handle fluids

Filed Under: Features, Science Tagged With: fluid, fluidlab, fluids, learning, liquids, manipulation, materials, objects, paper, researchers, robot, robotic, robots, simulation, simulator, systems, tasks, water

Fuzzy Logic Robotics unveils new robot simulation software

March 8, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Fuzzy Logic Robotics has launched its “no-code industrial robot programming and simulation software”, Fuzzy Studio, on its website.

Fuzzy Studio allows non-experts in robotics to create virtual cells and control industrial robots, enabling them to robotize their production at an affordable price and lower risk, even in situations that were once considered impossible, such as for small batches or complex parts.

Previously reserved for a select few, Fuzzy Studio is now available online to a wider audience and comes with informative documentation and tutorials. [Read more…] about Fuzzy Logic Robotics unveils new robot simulation software

Filed Under: Features, Software Tagged With: cell, fuzzy, industrial, license, logic, production, robot, robotic, robotics, simulation, software, studio, trajectories

Hannover Messe planning to be a ‘showcase for artificial intelligence’ this year

February 8, 2023 by David Edwards Leave a Comment

Hannover Messe, one of the world’s largest trade shows for industrial technologies, is planning to make this year’s event a “showcase for artificial intelligence”.

From 17 to 21 April 2023, Hannover Messe, held in Germany, will be shining a spotlight on the topic of “AI in manufacturing”.

Along with the subject of process optimization, exhibitors will be focusing on the role of AI in simulation, testing and product development. Generative AI is also making major inroads into industry. [Read more…] about Hannover Messe planning to be a ‘showcase for artificial intelligence’ this year

Filed Under: Artificial Intelligence, Features Tagged With: ai, data, development, industrial, industry, processes, product, simulation

Oil and gas drilling contractor Nabors acquires digital twin developer MindMesh

January 29, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Oil and gas drilling company Nabors has acquired engineering technology firm, MindMesh. The acquisition includes the downhole simulation and modeling technologies that the MindMesh team has developed.

Additionally, MindMesh co-founder and chief technology officer Raju Gandikota joined Nabors as a Director in the Controls and Automation group.

Plans are in the works to integrate several digital modeling and visualization technologies complementary to Nabors’ Smart Suite of drilling automation and digitalization products. [Read more…] about Oil and gas drilling contractor Nabors acquires digital twin developer MindMesh

Filed Under: Business, News Tagged With: analytics, data, digital, drilling, engineering, gandikota, mindmesh, modeling, nabors, performance, platform, rimo, schellenberg, simulation, team, technologies, time

Halodi Robotics uses Ansys to simulate humanoid robots

January 10, 2023 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Halodi Robotics is using Ansys simulation software through the Ansys Startup Program to develop its humanoid robots designed to work among humans in everyday environments.

Humanoid robots can help alleviate the growing labour shortage, and free critical personnel to focus on tasks that require their high-level skills.

These robots will perform jobs such as patrolling buildings at night, stocking grocery shelves, and executing logistical tasks at hospitals. With Elite Channel Partner EDRMedeso, Ansys enabled Halodi Robotics to shorten development time by months. [Read more…] about Halodi Robotics uses Ansys to simulate humanoid robots

Filed Under: News, Software Tagged With: ansys, assistant, develop, development, engineers, eve, executing, free, halodi, high, hospital, human, humanoid, humans, interact, logistical, making, months, motors, people, personnel, power, robot, robotics, robots, safe, safety, simulation, software, spend, systems, tasks, time, 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

Reinforcing the value of simulation: Teaching dexterity to a real robot hand

December 8, 2022 by Mark Allinson Leave a Comment

Nvidia researchers show how training in simulation enables the transfer of complex manipulation skills to a robot hand with project DeXtreme

The human hand is one of the most remarkable outcomes of millions of years of evolution. The ability to pick up all sorts of objects and use them as tools is a crucial differentiator allowing us to shape the world around us.

For robots to work in the everyday human world, the ability to deftly interact with our tools and the environment around them is critical. Without that capability, they will continue to be useful only in specialized domains such as factories or warehouses.

While it has been possible to teach robots with legs how to walk for some time, robots with hands have generally proven to be much trickier to control. A hand with fingers has more joints, and they must move in specific coordinated ways to accomplish a given task. [Read more…] about Reinforcing the value of simulation: Teaching dexterity to a real robot hand

Filed Under: Features, Science Tagged With: control, cube, data, dextreme, experiments, hand, hardware, isaac, learning, network, nvidia, project, real, researchers, robot, robotics, robots, simulation, simulations, task, time, train, training, work

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  • Building blocks: SAEKI emerges from stealth with $2.3 million funding round
  • Seaports to install almost 400,000 automated guided vehicles by 2030
  • ATI Industrial Automation makes its multi-axis force/torque sensors compatible with Fanuc robots
  • McCoy’s Building Supply brings in Badger robots to help operate stores
  • Chery Automotive installs more than 100 ForwardX mobile robots in its ‘Super Factory’
  • Cyngn agrees ‘pre-order’ deal with Arauco for 100 autonomous electric forklifts
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