IROS 2013: UAVs Get a Grip With Full-Size Robot Arms

ROS 2013: UAVs Get a Grip With Full-Size Robot Arms

As amazing as flying robots are, there's a limited amount of useful stuff that they can do today. Oh, they're great for surveillance and inspection, there's potential to use them to deliver stuff, and in some specialized circumstances we've seen them cooperatively building structures. But to really be useful in the way that we've come to expect from robots, they're going to need to be able to move a variety of objects at will, picking them up and putting them down whenever and wherever they need to. We saw some of the first examples of this at IROS, giving a whole new meaning to the term “mobile manipulator.”

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/aerial-robots/iros-2013-uavs-get-a-grip-with-fullsize-robot-arms

HiBot Demos New Amphibious Snake Robot

Japanese company HiBot, specialized in robots for extreme environments, will unveil the latest version of its ACM-R5H snake robot at the International Robot Exhibition (iREX) this week in Tokyo.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/hibot-demos-new-amphibious-snake-robot

Stochastic Robots Assemble and Disassemble Themselves

"Stochastic" is another way of saying random, and stochastic robots are robots that harness the powers of randomness to construct themselves. It's a fairly simple idea that can result in fairly complex objects: you've got some number of different modules, which can come together to form a robot. Instead of putting the modules together and building the robot directly, you instead just toss all of the modules and shake it really really hard. As the modules randomly run into each other, each is programed to latch on if it happens to bump into a module that it's supposed to be next to in the final design. And if you do this for long enough, eventually you'll end up with a fully assembled robot. Or that's the basic idea, anyway.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/medical-robots/stochastic-robots-assemble-and-disassemble-themselves

Modular Robots

Robots out on the factory floor pretty much know what's coming. Constrained as they are by programming and geometry, their world is just an assembly line. But for robots operating outdoors, away from civilization, both mission and geography are unpredictable. Here, robots with the ability to change their shape could be of great value, since they could adapt to constantly varying tasks and environments. Modular reconfigurable robots—experimental systems made by interconnecting multiple, simple, similar units--can perform such shape shifting.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/industrial-robots/modular-robots

EPFL Developing Connectors for Modular Floating Robots

This is an artistic rendering of a project that's being developed at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). The Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) is working on a robot (yes, that's totally a robot) made up of soft, floating modules that connect to each other through electroadhesion.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/epfl-developing-connectors-for-modular-floating-robots

Linkbot: That Modular Robot You've Always Wanted Is Now on Kickstarter

Last month (I don't know how it can possibly be just last month but somehow it is) at Stanford's Robot Block Party, we talked to the guys over at Barobo, who gave us a peek at a modular educational robot system that they were getting ready to Kickstart. The project has now launched, meaning that the time to get a DIY modular robotics kit of your very own is right now.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/linkbot-that-modular-robot-youve-always-wanted-is-now-on-kickstarter

iMobot Brings Robot Modules to Modular Robots

We love the concept behind modular robots: they're simple, cheap, easy to use, and capable of doing anything you want them to do, as long as you're willing to let them reconfigure. They're also easy to fix, and in many cases, capable of fixing themselves. So for example, if you've got a modular humanoid that you decide to kick in the face, it can put itself back together, as long as it's got enough modules attached to each other to enable movement. But single modules, left on their own, are more or less helpless.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/imobot-brings-robot-modules-to-modular-robots