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UR+ ecosystem adds VR solutions to teleoperate cobots

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Extend’s AMAS allows users to control cobots remotely. | Source: Extend Robotics

Universal Robots added Extend Robotics‘ Advanced Mechanical Assistance System (AMAS) to its UR+ ecosystem, a collection of more than 340 certified kits, components, grippers, software and safety accessories that integrate with the company’s collaborative robots (cobots). 

AMAS lets users control robotic arms remotely from anywhere in the world. The system works with user-friendly technology like Oculus and StreamVR, making it accessible to non-technical users. The virtual reality devices create 3D environments, which give users full depth perception. The equipment allows for easier controls using arm-and-hand gestures.

“We are thrilled to be part of the UR+ ecosystem,” Dr. Chang Liu, CEO and chief designer at Extend, said. “As one of the world leaders in collaborative robotics, being an official partner of Universal Robots demonstrates the quality and potential impact our products can have.”

Universal Robots’ UR+ program makes implementing cobots easier and faster by providing a network of trusted providers that provide easily integratable accessories for company’s cobots. 

“Working closely together with Extend Robotics was a great experience,” Stefan Kollmannsberger, senior UR+ implementation engineer, said. “It is always amazing to see innovative companies using new ideas to open application fields for our cobot! With the current challenges our world is facing teleoperating of our cobot will become more and more important. I am happy to see Extend Robotics joining our UR+ Ecosystem with their product!”

Universal Robots is based in Odense, Denmark and is owned by Teradyne. The company, along with AutoGuide Mobile Robots, Energid, and Mobile Industrial Robots are part of Teradyne’s industrial automation group. 

In 2021, Universal Robots brought in a record $311 million in revenue, which accounted for almost 83% of all the revenue for the industrial automation group. The company’s revenue increased 41% over 2020. 

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A flexible way to grab items with feeling: Engineers develop a robotic gripper with rich sensory capabilities

The notion of a large metallic robot that speaks in monotone and moves in lumbering, deliberate steps is somewhat hard to shake. But practitioners in the field of soft robotics have an entirely different image in mind—autonomous devices composed of compliant parts that are gentle to the touch, more closely resembling human fingers than R2-D2 or Robby the Robot.
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MIT CSAIL develops robotic gripper that can feel what it grabs

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The GelSight fin ray gripper was able to feel the pattern on Mason jars. | Source: CSAIL

A research team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has developed a robotic gripper with fin ray fingers that are able to feel the objects it manipulates. 

The Perceptual Science Group at CSAIL, led by professor Edward Adelson and Sandra Liu, a mechanical engineering PhD student, created touch sensors for their gripper, allowing it to feel with the same or more sensitivity as human skin. 

The team’s gripper is made of two fin ray fingers. The fingers act similar to a fish’s tail, which will bend towards an applied force rather than away, and are 3D printed from a flexible plastic material. Typical fin ray grippers have cross-struts that run through the interior, but the CSAIL team decided to hollow out the interior to make room for their sensory components. 

The inside of the gripper is illuminated by LEDs. On one end of the hollowed-out gripper sits a camera mounted to a semi-rigid backing. The camera faces a layer of pads made of a silicone gel called GelSight. The layer of pads is glued to a thin sheet of acrylic material, which is attached to the opposite end of the inner cavity. 

The gripper is designed to fold seamlessly around the objects it grips. The camera determines how the silicone and acrylic sheets deform as it touches an object. From these observations, the camera, with computational algorithms, can figure out the general shape of the object, how rough its surface is, its orientation in space and the force being applied by, and imparted to, each finger. 

Using this method, the gripper was able to handle a variety of objects, including a mini-screwdriving, a plastic strawberry, an acrylic paint tube, a Ball Mason jar and a wine glass. 

While holding these objects, the gripper was able to detect fine details on their surfaces. For example, on the plastic strawberry, the gripper could identify individual seeds on its surface. The fingers could also feel the lettering on the Mason jar, something that vision-based robotics struggle with because of the way glass objects refract light. 

Additionally, the gripper could squeeze a paint tube without breaking the container and spilling its contents, and pick up and put down a wine glass. The gripper could sense when the base of the glass touched the tabletop, resulting in proper placement seven out of 10 times. 

The team hopes to improve on the sensor by making the fingers stronger. By removing the cross-struts, the team also removed much of the structural integrity, meaning the fingers have a tendency to twist while gripping things. The CSAIL team also want to create a three fingered gripper that could pick up fruits and vegetables and evaluate their ripeness. 

The team’s work was presented at the 2022 IEEE 5th International Conference on soft robotics. 

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United Robotics Group acquires SoftBank Robotics Europe

Trust is key to service robot design, says SoftBank Robotics

The Pepper humanoid service robot was designed to inspire trust. Source: SoftBank

United Robotics Group, a German distributor of service robots, is acquiring Softbank Robotics Europe. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Softbank Robotics Europe, which develops the Pepper and Nao robots, will revert to its original name, Aldebaran, which it used prior to being acquired by Softbank.

SoftBank will acquire a minority stake in United Robotics Group. The two companies will continue to cooperate in marketing robots. The transaction is subject to merger clearance and is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022. This deal was first reported to be in the works back in October 2021.

United has been the master distributor of Nao and Pepper in Europe since October 2021, responsible for sales, service and maintenance. It also distributes the Pudu service robot, Boston Dynamics’ Spot quadruped, the Sawyer collaborative robot arm and other robots. United is backed by Hahn, a major industrial automation player in Germany. Hahn acquired the IP for Rethink Robotics after the company shut down in 2018. Hahn has since relaunched Sawyer.

“We are pleased to welcome SBRE with more than 180 exceptionally motivated robotics specialists,” said Thomas Hähn, founder and CEO of United Robotics Group. “This is an important step for us on the way to further internationalizing our company. The future Aldebaran with their strong reputation in the market will help us to further expand our great potential in combining interaction robotics with our knowledge in collaborative industrial robotics.”

Fumihide Tomizawa, President & CEO, SoftBank Robotics Group, said: “We are strengthening our strategic partnerships with various robotics leader companies around the world. We are very pleased to form a strong partnership with a successful company, URG. We will leverage this great relationship to develop and market Pepper and a variety of other robots.”

It’s been a rocky few years for Softbank Robotics Europe and the Pepper humanoid. Reuters reported in June 2021 that Softbank stopped production of Pepper in 2020 and has fewer than 2,000 units left. According to Reuters, SoftBank planned to end sales of new Pepper units in 2023 at the latest. Sales of refurbished units will continue after this point, Reuters reported.

United Robotics Group distributes (left to right) Pepper, Sawyer, Double 3, Nao and Temi. It also distributes Boston Dynamics’ Spot.

It’s unclear at the moment if United Robotics Group and Aldebaran will restart manufacturing of new Pepper units. The Robot Report reached out to the companies and will update this story if new details emerge.

Pepper has been a money-losing proposition since it was introduced. Softbank Robotics Europe, which was acquired by Softbank for $100 million in 2012, lost $38 million in its fiscal 2019-2020 year and more than $119 million over the last three years.

In June 2021, Softbank Robotics Europe laid off 40% of its employees in Paris. An employee, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Robot Report at the time that “the market for Nao and Pepper is smaller than we expected.” The source also said Softbank wouldn’t be focusing on the Nao and Pepper robots much going forward.

It’s been clear for a while that both Nao and Pepper weren’t going to be a major part of Softbank’s robotics strategy going forward. In January 2021, for example, it was announced that Softbank Robotics will jointly develop robots with Japanese electronics maker Iris Ohyama. The joint venture, called Iris Robotics, never mentions Nao or Pepper.

The Whiz cleaning robot is Softbank’s new flagship robot, according to a source. Softbank has made other changes to its robotics strategy, most notably offloading 80% of its ownership stake in Boston Dynamics to Hyundai for $880 million. It also paid $2.8 billion for a 40% ownership stake in AutoStore, a leading developer of automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS), that debuted earlier this week on the Oslo Stock Exchange. AutoStore currently has a global blue-chip customer base with more than 600 installations and 20,000 robots across 35 countries.

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ROS 2 now available on Clearpath Robotics’ Husky UGV

husky ugv

Clearpath Robotics’ Husky UGV is an all-terrain mobile robot development platform. | Source: Clearpath Robotics

Editor’s Note: Brian Gerkey, co-founder and CEO of Open Robotics, is keynoting our Robotics Summit & Expo, which takes place May 10-11 in Boston. His talk, called “Robotics Needs a Babelfish: The Skinny on Robot Interoperability,” will discuss how companies are addressing interoperability, and what options are available to vendors, end users, and integrators. Attendees will learn about the history of Open-RMF (Robotics Middleware Framework), best practices for multiple vendor robot interoperability, and future interoperability trends.

Clearpath Robotics announced that ROS 2 is now available on its Husky unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The UGV is a medium-sized robotic development platform popular among robotics researchers. 

Husky is an all-terrain mobile robot that can be equipped with stereo cameras, LiDAR, GPS, IMUs and manipulators. The robot weighs in at 110 lbs, and has a payload capacity of 165 lbs. Its max speed is 2.2 MPH, and it can typically run for 3 hours on a single charge. According to Clearpath Robotics, Husky was the first field robotics platform to support ROS from its factory settings.

Husky was also one of the first robots outside of Willow Garage, a robotics research lab that developed ROS until Open Robotics was founded in 2012, to offer official ROS support. ROS 2 improves upon ROS 1, and makes it able to be used in more unique use cases, such as multi-robot teams, small embedded systems and non-ideal networks.

Clearpath and Open Robotics have a history of collaborating on mobile robot platforms. The two companies collaborated on the TurtleBot 4, the next generation of the popular open-source mobile robotics platform. TurtleBot 4 aims to build on the success of previous versions by providing a low-cost, fully extensible, ROS-enabled reference platform for robotics researchers, developers, and educators.

Open Robotics recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary. On March 22nd, 2012 it officially incorporated the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

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iRobot launches Create 3 educational robot

iRobot Create 3 educational robot

iRobot Create 3 educational robot. | Credit: iRobot

In celebration of National Robotics Week, iRobot today launched the Create 3 educational robot. Based on the Roomba i3 Series robot vacuum platform, Create 3 is a mobile robot development platform for advanced makers who are learning ROS 2.

Create 3 is available in the US ($299) and Canada ($399) now. It will be available in EMEA through authorized distributors in the coming months.

Create 3 doesn’t have vacuuming capabilities, but it offers a boatload of other features to advance one’s robotics knowledge. It comes pre-assembled and equipped with Wi-Fi, Ethernet-over-USB host, and Bluetooth. It also features an inertial measurement unit (IMU), optical floor tracking sensor, wheel encoders, and infrared sensors for autonomous localization, navigation, and telepresence applications. It also includes cliff, bump and slip detection, along with LED lights and a speaker.

Using the built-in USB-C port, you can attach and run third-party hardware on Create 3. With Create 3, you can build basic mobile robot applications or explore advanced applications including multi-robot exploration, navigation and mapping technology, and telepresence capabilities.

“iRobot is committed to delivering STEM tools to all levels of the educational community, empowering the next generation of engineers, scientists and enthusiasts to do more,” said Colin Angle, chairman and CEO of iRobot. “The advanced capabilities we’ve made available on Create 3 enable higher-level students, educators and developers to be in the driver’s seat of robotics exploration, allowing them to one day discover new ways for robots to benefit society.”

iRobot released a Python Web Playground for Create 3, along with its Root educational robot. iRobot said this provides a bridge for beginners to start learning more advanced programming skills outside of the iRobot Coding App. Python is a common coding language and enables users to broaden the complexity of their projects.

A 3D simulation of Create 3 is also available using Ignition Gazebo for increased access to robotics education and research.

The launch of Create 3 coincides with National Robotics Week, which runs April 2-10. Founded and organized by iRobot, National Robotics Week is a time to inspire students about robotics and STEM-related fields, and to share the excitement of robotics with audiences of all ages through a range of in-person and virtual events.

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On-the-fly reconfigurable magnetic slime used as a robot

A team of researchers affiliated with a host of entities in China has created a type of magnetic slime that can be configured on the fly to perform a variety of robotic tasks. In their paper published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the group describes their slime, possible uses for it and the actions they have taken to make it less toxic.
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A robot that can put a surgical gown on a supine mannequin

A pair of researchers working in the Personal Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London has taught a robot to put a surgical gown on a supine mannequin. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, Fan Zhang and Yiannis Demiris described the approach they used to teach the robot to partially dress the mannequin. Júlia Borràs, with Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC, has published a Focus piece in the same journal issue outlining the difficulties in getting robots to handle soft material and the work done by the researchers on this new effort.