Robotics & AI

Can a team of soccer-playing robots beat the human World Cup champions by 2050? That's the ultimate goal of RoboCup, an international tournament where teams of soccer robots compete in various categories, from small wheeled boxes to adult-size humanoids. IEEE Spectrum's Harry Goldstein traveled to Singapore to attend RoboCup 2010 -- and check out how the man vs. machine future of soccer is playing out.

The science behind gecko toes holds the answer to a dry adhesive that provides an ideal grip for robot feet. Stanford mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky is using the new material, based on the structure of a gecko foot, to keep his robots climbing.

Getting oil out of water isn’t that hard, on principle. What is hard is getting a huge amount of oil out of an even huger amount of water. If you think about it, this is really a perfect task for a swarm of robots, since it’s simple and repeatable and just needs to be done over and over (and over and over and over) again. With this in mind, MIT’s Senseable City Lab has created Seaswarm, a swarm of networked oil spill cleanup robots:

Perhaps the most difficult control problem for a drive servo is that of going down a ramp. Any back drivable drive servo will exhibit a freewheeling velocity on a given ramp. This is the speed at which the robot will roll down the ramp in an unpowered state. At this speed, the surface drag and internal drag of the servo are equal to the gravitational force multiplied by the sine of the slope. The freewheeling speed is thus load dependent.

Researchers from Leeds University are working on a camera and drill-weilding robot known as Djedi to solve the mystery of the blocked shafts inside the Great Pyramid at Giza. In 1992 and 2002, remote cameras were sent through the shaft under the watchful eye of antiquities master Dr. Zahi Hawass only to be stopped by limestone doors. Dr. Robert Richardson of the Mechanical Engineering department said their goal is to find out what is beyond the blocks and go as far as possible to discover the purpose of the shafts, all while doing minimal damage to the structure. Final preparations are being made now with hopes of sending the robot in before year's end. Place your bets now!

levelHead is a spatial memory game by Julian Oliver. levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors. In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit. Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player's spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms? There are three cubes (levels) in total, each of which are connected by a single door. Players have the goal of moving the character from room to room, cube to cube in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish.. The game then begins again.

As Paolo Robuffo Giordano and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, in Tübingen, Germany, would have it, scientific research means riding the business end of a giant industrial robot arm while playing video games. But hey -- they produced some serious research on it, which was presented at ICRA 2010.  The CyberMotion Simulator is basically a full motion simulator adapted to a racing car game. Players (or subjects, the researchers prefer to call them) sit in a cabin on a robot arm some 2 meters off the ground and drive a Ferrari F2007 car around a projected track with force-feedback steering wheel and pedals. The aim is to make the experience as realistic as possible without having to buy a real F2007, and to test the simulator with an environment that requires sudden, massive acceleration.

Danish Technological Institute's Centre for Robot Technology, one of Europe's leading innovators of robotics, is expanding with larger robot laboratories built in the science park Forskerparken in Odense. The new building takes part in strengthening the Centre’s ties to University of Southern Denmark, which is close by together with other of the Centre’s partner companies.

Researchers at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research are working on a new mathematical model to mimic the human brain's ability to identify objects. The model can predict human performance on certain visual-perception tasks suggesting it’s a good indication of what's actually happening in the brain. Researchers are hoping the new findings will make their way into future object-recognition systems for automation, mobile robotics, and other applications.

The "kid-size" humanoid league at the RoboCup features standardized humanoid robots that teams write software for. The reigning 2009 champs, from Technische Universitat Darmstadt, worked on making shots and passes quicker in this year's matches. Watch the video highlights and see if their strategy paid off.

Humans aren't the only ones playing soccer right now. In just two days, robots from world-renowned universities will compete in Singapore for RoboCup 2010. This is the other World Cup, where players range from 15-centimeter tall Wall-E-like bots to adult-sized advanced humanoids. The RoboCup, now in its 14th edition, is the world’s largest robotics and artificial intelligence competition with more than 400 teams from dozens of countries. The idea is to use the soccer bots to advance research in machine vision, multi-agent collaboration, real-time reasoning, sensor-fusion, and other areas of robotics and AI. But its participants also aim to develop autonomous soccer playing robots that will one day be able to play against humans. The RoboCup's mission statement:

Dennis Hong, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of Virginia Tech's Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory, or RoMeLa, has created robots with the most unusual shapes and sizes -- from strange multi-legged robots to amoeba-like robots with no legs at all. Now he's unveiling a new robot with a more conventional shape: a full-sized humanoid robot called CHARLI, or Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning Intelligence. The robot is 5-foot tall (1.52 meter), untethered and autonomous, capable of walking and gesturing. But its biggest innovation is that it does not use rotational joints. Most humanoid robots -- Asimo, Hubo, Mahru -- use DC motors to rotate various joints (typically at the waist, hips, knees, and ankles). The approach makes sense and, in fact, today's humanoids can walk, run, and climb stairs. However, this approach doesn't correspond to how our own bodies work, with our muscles contracting and relaxing to rotate our various joints.

Remember Hitachi’s little helper robot, EMIEW 2 (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Work-mate)?  It’s been a couple of years since we heard anything regarding the project and we feared the worst.  Hitachi has put those fears to rest by holding a news conference to show off its new enhanced voice recognition and driving performance! Known primarily for its unique legs which have wheels for feet, EMIEW 2 can drive at up to 6km/h to keep pace with people.  If it needs to carry something it can kneel down (for added stability) and scoot around, and thanks to its bipedal legs it can step over obstacles that are too high to drive over.  Now it has been given adaptive suspension control technology which increases its stability when driving over bumpy terrain such as elevator doors.  During the press demonstration, EMIEW 2′s springy legs bobbed independently as it drove over cables and uneven flooring.

California-based company Anybots continues work on a telepresence robot that can take communication to a whole new level by eliminating the need for people to actually be present at board meetings or conferences. Because God knows executives work hard enough. The idea behind QA, the robot, is to interact with people, such as clients or partners, from anywhere in the world, which will save a lot of money on travel costs and different remote-communications equipment. Designed not unlike a sophisticated Skype program, QA relies on a Wi-Fi connection to allow users to interact through video, sound and diagrams projected from and onto the robot’s interface. With a sleek white exterior design, the armless 5-foot robot looks just about how you would expect a robot tailored for the boardroom to look. His rectangular-shaped face with two big eyes reminds a bit of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., so people should warm up to it fairly quickly.

You might think that some devices in the modern age have reached their maximum development level, such as the common desk-lamp, but you would be wrong. Natan Linder, a student from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a robotic version that can not only light your room, but project internet pages on your desk as well. It is an upgrade on the AUR lamp from 2007, which tracks movements around a desk or table and can alter the color, focus, and strength of its light to suit the user’s needs. The LuminAR comes with those abilities, and much more. The robotic arm can move about on its own, and combines a vision system with a pico projector, wireless computer and camera. When turned on, the projector will look for a flat space around your room on which to display images. Since it can project more than one internet window, you can check your email and browse another website at the same time.

Justin is a dexterous humanoid robot that can make coffee. Now it's learning to fix satellites. Justin was developed at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), in Wessling, Germany. The robot has different configurations, including one with wheels. The space version has a head, torso, and arms, but no wheels or legs, because it will be mounted on a spacecraft or satellite. The goal is to use Justin to repair or refuel satellites that need to be serviced. Its creators say that ideally the robot would work autonomously. To replace a module or refuel, for example, you'd just press a button and the robot would do the rest. But that's a long-term goal. For now, the researchers are relying on another approach: robotic telepresence. A human operator controls the robot from Earth, using a head-mounted display and a kind of arm exoskeleton. That way the operator can see what the robot sees and also feel the forces the robot is experiencing.

The Balancing Cube is a robotic sculpture that can stand on any of its corners. Pendulum-like modules, located on the inner faces of the cube, constantly adjust their positions to shift the structure's center of gravity and keep it balanced. The cube remains stable even if you poke it. But not too hard! Created by Raffaello D'Andrea, Sebastian Trimpe, and Matt Donovan at ETH Zurich, the contraption is half art and half technology. They got their inspiration from a Cirque du Soleil performance in which acrobats use their bodies to support each other and balance together in seemingly impossible positions.

Humans have been coming up with innovative ways with which to plunder the Earth and its resources for as long as we have existed, so perhaps its time we give back a little. Leading aquatic animals, such as fish, away from underwater power plant turbines seems like a good place to begin, and a researcher at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University has designed a robot that will help just with that. Assistant professor Maurizio Porfiri studied the characteristics of small schools of fish to learn what exactly they look for in a leader, and he designed a palm-sized robot that possesses these traits. By taking command, this leader can be programmed to guide the fish away from danger, but the tricky part is getting the animals to accept the robot as one of their own.

Later this month, Carnegie Mellon's CMDragons small-size robotic soccer team will be competing again at RoboCup, to be held in Singapore. CMDragons has tended to find their edge in their software as opposed to their hardware. Their latest software advantage will be their new "physics-based planning", using physics to decide how to move and turn with the ball in order to maintain control. Previous control strategies simply planned where the robot should move to and shoot from, assuming a ball placed at the front center of the dribbler bar would stay there. The goal of Robocup is to create a humanoid robotic soccer team to compete against human players in 2050. Manuela Veloso, the professor who leads the Carnegie Mellon robotic soccer lab, "believe[s] that the physics-based planning algorithm is a particularly noteworthy accomplishment" that will take the effort one step closer to the collective goal.

Scientists from Columbia University, Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a robot that’s just 4 nanometers wide. And no, it doesn’t have flashing lights, video cameras or wheels. It does, however, have four legs, and the ability to start, move, turn, and stop. Descendants of the molecular nanobot, or “spider,” could someday be used to treat diseases such as cancer or diabetes. The team built the spider by starting with a protein called streptavidin, that conveniently has four symmetrically-placed binding pockets for a chemical called biotin. The legs were made from four strands of biotin-labeled DNA, which were bound to the pockets. Three of the legs were made from enzymatic DNA, which is a type that binds to and then dissociates (cuts away) from other particular sequences of DNA. Its fourth leg was made from what the researchers call a “start strand” of DNA - it keeps the spider tethered to its starting site, until it’s released.