Due to ICRA (among other robot-y things), we had to take a bit of a break from our TurtleBot tutorials, but we're back this week to help get you going with Linux and ROS. The good news is, if you managed to survive the Ubuntu install, getting ROS installed is a cinch. The latest ROS version is called Groovy Galapagos (hence the hippie tortoise above). We'll help you through it, and provide some tips on using Linux, in the next installment of our tutorial. Groovy!
Yesterday, Microsoft held an event to announce its brand new Kinect sensor, and... Uh... Something else that we can't remember offhand, so it must not be that important. If you've hung around here long enough, you've probably noticed that Kinect sensors are on all kinds of robots nowadays, because they're inexpensive and pretty darn awesome. Plus, since so many people have them, there's a huge community that encourages ease of use.
But Kinect is nearly three years old, which is basically prehistoric in technological terms. It's time for something new, and better, and here it is.
Octopi are pro swimmers, thanks (at least in part) to that octet of arms they've got going on. They've adopted a particular swimming gait called sculling, which works great for them, but until they start publishing scientific papers, we're missing out on all of their gait testing data. Roboticists have had to start from scratch, and along the way, they've experimented with some swimming gaits that we've never seen a real octopus try and pull off.
Just a few weeks ago, IEEE Spectrum wrote about an artificial compound insect eye that was developed by a group of researchers based in the United States. Not to be outdone, a group from EPFL in Switzerland has announced their own artificial compound insect eye, and we got a hands-on a few weeks ago in Lausanne.
These last couple weeks have been crammed full of more robots than humans like us can reasonably be expected to handle. So, you'll have to forgive us while we wade through massive amounts of incredibly extraordinarily SUPER COOL robot stuff, and you can expect several weeks worth of brand new stuff from ICRA and more. That's not happening today, though, because of course today is Video Friday!
No matter how capable you make a robot, its effectiveness is limited by how well you can control it. And until we've got this whole general autonomy thing nailed down (better not hold your breath), that means a lot of teleoperation. JPL has been working on a new gesture-based human interface called BioSleeve, which uses a [insert collective noun for sensors here] of EMG sensors, IMUs, and magnetometers to decode hand and arm gestures and map them to an intuitive robot control system.
German robotics giant Kuka announced last week a competition designed to advance mobile manipulation applications and promote the company's youBot as a platform for robotics research. The Kuka Innovation in Mobile Manipulation Award is open to researchers from around the world, who are invited to build a new and creative application in the field of mobile manipulation, with the only requisite being that a youBot be part of the system. And the prize? The winner takes all: €20,000 in cash.
Humans use all sorts of bizarre, abstract terms to describe how objects feel, and it’s endlessly frustrating to robots. Or at least, we imagine it must be. Take a word like "squishy," for example: how would you explain that feeling to a robot who experiences touch through some long series of numbers? Researchers at University of Pennsylvania's Haptics Group (part of the GRASP Lab) and UC Berkeley have developed a system to teach robots how these abstract terms apply to real-world objects, to help our mechanical friends communicate with us in a more relatable way.
