MIT News November 19, 2024 Fast and accurate physics simulation is an essential component of robot learning, where robots can explore failure scenarios that are difficult to produce in the real world and learn from unlimited on-policy data. Yet, it remains challenging to incorporate RGB-color perception into the sim-to-real pipeline that matches the real world in its richness and realism. Researchers at MIT trained a robot dog in simulation for visual parkour. They proposed a way to use generative models to synthesize diverse and physically accurate image sequences of the scene from the robot’s ego-centric perspective. They presented demonstrations of […]
Category Archives: Robots
A space walking robot could build a giant telescope in space
Phys.org November 7, 2024 Key requirements for next-generation space manipulators include dexterity, modularity, redundancy, workspace enhancement, and autonomous mobility. Researchers in the UK addressed these issues with a novel seven-degrees-of-freedom dexterous End-Over-End Walking Robot (E-Walker) for future In-Space Assembly and Manufacturing missions. They considered the in-situ robotic assembly of the primary mirror of a 25 m Large Aperture Space Telescope (LAST). Comparing the power, time, control and motion planning complexities of eleven mission Concept of Operations (ConOps), the trade-off analysis shortlisted a potential mission scenario. The operational assessments of two potential mission ConOps were compared to estimate the time required […]
Self-propelled shape-changing robots mimic aquatic insects for untethered swimming
Nanowerk October 8, 2024 Despite recent advances in the field of small-scale robots, the development of efficient, untethered, and integrated powering, actuation, and control of small-scale robots remains a challenge due to the out-of-equilibrium and dissipative nature of the driving physical and chemical phenomena. An international team of researchers (USA – University of Michigan, Canada) designed small-scale, bioinspired aquatic locomotors with programmable deterministic trajectories that integrated self-propelled chemical motors and photoresponsive shape-morphing structures. They developed robots integrating structural protein networks that self-regulated the release of chemical fuel with photochemical liquid crystal network (LCN) actuators that changed their shape and deformed […]
New method could allow multi-robot teams to autonomously and reliably explore other planets
Phys.org June 9, 2024 Researchers in the UK proposed a novel methodology for trustworthy autonomous multi-robot teams which incorporates data from multiple sources (HiRISE orbiter imaging, probability distribution maps, and on-board rover sensors) to find efficient exploration routes in Jezero crater. A map was generated, consisting of a 3D terrain model, traversability analysis, and probability distribution map of points of scientific interest. A three-stage mission planner generated an efficient route, which maximized the accumulated probability of identifying points of interest. A 4D RRT* algorithm was used to determine smooth, flat paths, and prioritized planning was used to coordinate a safe […]
A technique for more effective multipurpose robots
MIT News June 3, 2024 Existing robotic datasets vary in different modalities such as color, depth, tactile, and proprioceptive information, and collected in different domains. Current methods usually collect and pool all data from one domain to train a single policy to handle such heterogeneity in tasks and domains, which is prohibitively expensive and difficult. Researchers at MIT presented a flexible approach, called Policy Composition, to combine information across such diverse modalities and domains for learning scene-level and task-level generalized manipulation skills, by composing different data distributions represented with diffusion models. Their method could use task-level composition for multi-task manipulation […]
Battery-free robots use origami to change shape in mid-air
Science Daily September 13, 2023 Researchers at the University of Washington designed origami battery-free microfliers using bistable leaf-out structures and found that a simple change in the shape of the origami structures caused two dramatically different falling behaviors. When unfolded and flat, the microfliers exhibited a tumbling behavior that increased lateral displacement in the wind. When folded inward, their orientation was stabilized, resulting in a downward descent that was less influenced by wind. To electronically transition between these two shapes, they designed a low-power electromagnetic actuator that produced peak forces of up to 200 millinewtons within 25 milliseconds while powered […]
Discovering nanomachines within living organisms: Cytochromes P450 unleashed as living soft robots
Phys.org August 7, 2023 An international team of researchers (Israel, India) addressed the difference between regular 3D matter and the nanomachines in ‘living matters’ (e.g., the CYP450 enzymes), which oxidize an array of essential substrate molecules. Molecular dynamics simulations revealed that, unlike 3D materials, CYP450s are 4D nanomachines, in which the fourth dimension was a sensing mechanism whereby the protein responds to an initial stimulus of substrate entrance and performs an autonomous chain of events (the catalytic cycle), which leads to substrate oxidation. They found that stimulus was the binding of a substrate molecule that eventually underwent oxidation in a […]
Allowing robots to explore on their own
Science Daily July 21, 2023 Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University has proposed dual-resolution scheme to achieve time-efficient autonomous exploration with one or many robots using a high-resolution local map of the robot’s immediate vicinity and a low-resolution global map of the remaining areas of the environment. The high-resolution bounded local map ensures that the robots observe the entire region in detail and the computation burden is bounded. The low-resolution global map directs the robot to explore the broad space and only requires lightweight computation and low bandwidth to communicate among the robots. Their paper shows the strength of this approach […]
Researchers build bee robot that can twist
Science Daily May 23, 2023 A team of researchers in the US (UCLA, industries, Washington State University) has developed a an insect-scale flying robot, Bee ++, driven by four independently actuated flapping wings using new method for synthesizing and implementing high-performance six-degree-of-freedom (6 -DOF) flight controllers. Each wing of the Bee ++ was installed with a preset orientation enabling reliable roll, pitch, and yaw torque generation, and a Lyapunov-based nonlinear control architecture that enabled closed-loop position and attitude regulation and tracking. The control algorithms stabilize position and attitude by independently varying the wing stroke amplitudes of the four flapping wings. […]
Researchers develop soft robot that shifts from land to sea with ease
Science Daily March 14, 2023 A team of researcers in the USA (Carnegie Mellon University, UCLA) has developed a multimodal soft robot locomotion using highly compact and dynamic bistable soft actuators. The actuators are composed of a prestretched membrane sandwiched between two 3D printed frames with embedded shape memory alloy (SMA) coils. The actuator can swiftly transform between two oppositely curved states and generate a force through a snap-through instability that is triggered after 0.2 s of electrical activation with an electrical energy input power. The consistency and robustness of the snap-through actuator response was experimentally validated through cyclical testing. […]