ROS / Open Source Solutions – 机器人研究与发展

2019年7月30日2019年7月30日

Top 10 ROS-based robotics companies in 2019

Source: Ricardo Tellez

The Robot Operating System is becoming the standard in robotics, not only for robotics research, but also for robotics companies that build and sell robots. In this article, I offer a list of the top 10 robotics companies worldwide that base their robotics products on ROS.

Criteria

This is the list of criteria I followed to select the winners:

We are talking about robotics companies that build robots. This is not about companies that produce some kind of software based in ROS, but companies that create and ship robots based in ROS. We do not consider companies that do consulting and generate solutions for a third party, either.
They have created the robots themselves. This means they are not resellers or distributors of robots made by somebody else.
They have their robots natively running ROS. This means, you switch the robot on, and it is running ROS. We are not taking into account robots that support ROS — if you install the packages. We concentrate on robots that run ROS off the shelf. For example, you can run ROS on a UR5 arm robot, but if you buy the UR5 robot, it will not come with ROS support off the shelf. You need to add an extra layer of work. We are not considering those robots.
You can program the robots. Even if some companies provide ROS-based robots — such as Locus Robotics — they do not provide a way to program them. They provide the robots as a closed solution. We are not considering closed solutions here.

To summarize the criteria: 1. You can buy the robot directly from the company; 2. The robot runs ROS from Minute 1; and 3. You can program the robot at will.

Once the companies were selected based on the previous criteria, I had to decide the order. Order was based on my personal perception of the impact those companies are making in the ROS world. That is very subjective to my own experience, I know, but that is what it is. Whenever I felt it necessary, I described my motivation behind the position of the company on the list.

Now, having clarified all that, let’s go to the list!

Top 10 ROS companies

1. Clearpath Robotics

Clearpath is a Canadian company founded in 2009. The number of robots that it produces in the fields of unmanned ground vehicles, unmanned surface vehicles (on the water), and industrial vehicles is amazing. The company’s robots are based on ROS and can be programmed with ROS from Minute 1. That is why these robots are used in the creation of third-party applications for mining, survey, inspection, agriculture, and material handling.

Some of Clearpath’s best-known robots include Jackal UGV, which you can learn how to program. Others include the Husky UGV, Heron USV, and its recently launched series of Otto robots for industrial environments.

As a matter of trustability, this company took the responsibility to provide the customer support to the existing PR2 robots, once Willow Garage closed its doors. Because of that, and because it is the company with the most varied ROS robots available, I put it in the well-deserved No. 1 spot on this list.

I interviewed Ryan Gariepy, CTO of Clearpath, for the ROS Developers podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

2. Fetch Robotics

Fetch Robotics was founded by Melonee Wise in 2014, after she was forced to close her previous pioneer company, Unbounded Robotics. We can say that Fetch has two lines of business. First is its line of mobile manipulators, which are mainly used for robotics research.

Then, Fetch has a line of industrial robots which it sells in fleets ready to be deployed in a warehouse to help with the transport of materials. As I understand it, the first line of business is the only one that allows direct ROS programming, and the second one is a closed product.

I did not select Fetch for No. 2 because of its research line only. I selected it for this spot because Fetch was a pioneer in the creation of affordable mobile manipulators with its Fetch robot (paired with the Freight mobile platform). Up to the moment it released Fetch, there was no ROS-based mobile manipulator on the market. (Sorry, Turtlebot 2 with a Dynamixel arm doesn’t count as a mobile manipulator.)

Recently, Fetch organized the FetchIt! challenge at ICRA 2019. (My company, The Construct, was a partner contributing to the event’s simulation.) At that event, participants had to program their Fetch to produce some pieces in a manufacturing room. You can check the results here.

Even if Fetch Robotics only produces two robots meeting the criteria above, it was the pioneer that opened the field of ROS-based mobile manipulators. That is why it deserves the No. 2 spot on this list.

I interviewed Melonee Wise, CEO of Fetch Robotics, for the ROS Developers podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

3. Pal Robotics

Pal Robotics is based in Barcelona and was created in 2004. I especially love Pal because I worked there for more than seven years, and many of my friends are there. But love is not the reason I put them in the third position.

Pal Robotics earned No. 3 because it’s the only company in the world that builds and sells human-size humanoid robots. And not just a single type of humanoid, but three different types! The Reem robot, Reem-C robot, and recently, the TALOS robot.

Pal also produces mobile manipulators similar to the Fetch ones. They are called Tiago, and you can buy them for your research or applications on top. (If you’re interested, you can learn how to program Tiago robots with ROS in an online course that The Construct created in collaboration with Pal Robotics.)

We have recently released a simulation of TALOS, including its walking controllers. You can get it here.

I interviewed Luca Marchionni, CTO of Pal Robotics, for the ROS Developers podcast. You can listen to the interview here. Also, you can learn what is catkin_make and how to use it.

In addition, I interviewed Victor Lopez, main DevOps engineer of Pal Robotics, for the ROS Developers podcast. You can listen to that interview here.

4. Robotnik

Robotnik is another Spanish company, based in Castellon and founded in 2002. I call it “the Spanish Clearpath.” Really, it has built as many ROS robots as the first company on this list. Robotnik creates and designs mobile manipulators, unmanned ground vehicles of different types, and many types of mobile robots for industrial applications and logistics.

The company is also expert in personalizing your robot by integrating third-party robotics parts into a final ROS-based robot that meets your requirements.

Finally, Robotnik’s team includes the people behind the ROS Components online shop, where you can buy components for your robots that are certified to be ROS supported off the shelf. For all this extensive activity in selling ROS robots, Robotnik deserves the fourth position on this list.

A couple of months ago, Robotnik sent us one of its Summit XL robots for experimenting and creating ROS training materials. We used it extensively for our ROS Live Classes, showing how to program Robotinik robots using a cloud robotics platform.

We also created a specific course to train people to program their Summit XL robot.

I interviewed Roberto Martinez, CEO of Robotnik, for the ROS Developers podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

5. Yujin Robots

Yujin is a Korean company specializing in vacuum cleaning robots. However, those robots are not the reason they are on this list, since they do not run ROS onboard. Instead, Yujin is here because it’s the official seller of the Kobuki robot, that is, the base system of the Turtlebot 2 robot.

The Turtlebot 2 is the most famous ROS robot in the world, even more so than the PR2! Almost every one of us has learned with that robot, either in simulation or in reality. Due to its low cost, it allows you to easily enter into the ROS world.

If you have bought a Turtlebot 2 robot, it is very likely that the base was made by Yujin. We used Kobuki as the base of our robot Barista, and I use several of them at my ROS class at La Salle University.

Additionally, Yujin has developed another ROS robot for logistics that is called GoCart, a very interesting robot for logistics inside buildings (but not warehouses). The robot can be used to send packages from one location in the building to another — including elevators on the path.

6. Robotis

This is another Korean company that is making it big in the ROS world. Even if Robotis is well known for its Dynamixel servos, it’s best known in the ROS world because of its Turtlebot 3 robot and Open manipulator, both presented as the next generation of the Turtlebot series.

With the development of the Turtlebot 3, Robotis brought the Turtlebot concept to another level, allowing people easier entry into ROS. The manipulator is also very well integrated with the Turtlebot 3, so you can have a complete mobile manipulator for a few hundred dollars.

Even easier, the company has made all the designs of both robots open-source, so you can build the robots yourself. Here are the designs of Turtlebot 3. Here are the designs of Open Manipulator.

7. Shadow Robot

Shadow Robot is based in London. This company is a pioneer in the development of humanoid robotic hands. To my knowledge, Shadow Robot is the only company in the world that sells that kind of robotic hand.

Furthermore, its hands are ROS-programmable off the shelf. Apart from hands, Shadow Robot also produces many other types of grippers, which can be mounted on robotic arms to create complete grasping solutions.

One of its solutions combined with third-party robots was the Smart Grasping System released in 2016. It compbined a three-fingered gripper with a UR5 robot. Hhere is a simulation we created of the Smart Grasping System, in collaboration with Ugo Cupcic.

Shadow Robot’s products include the Shadow Hand, the Cyberglobe, and the Tactile telerobot.

Demonstrating its leadership in the field, Shadow Robot’s hands were selected by the OpenAI company to do their reinforcement learning experiments with robots that need to learn dexterity.

8. Husarion

Husarion is a Polish company founded in 2013. It sells simple and compact autonomous mobile robots called ROSbots. They are small, four-wheeled robots equipped with a lidar, camera, and a point cloud device. These robots are perfect for learning ROS with a real robot, or for doing research and learning with a more compact robot than the Turtlebot 2.

Husarion also produces the Panther robot, which is more oriented to outdoor environments, but with the same purpose of research and learning.

What makes Husarion different from other companies selling ROS robots is the compactness of its robots and its creation of the Husarnet network, which connects the robots through the cloud and has remote control over them.

I interviewed Dominik Novak, CEO of Husarion for the ROS Developers podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

9. Neobotix

Neobotix is a manufacturer of mobile robots and robot systems in general. It provides robots and manipulators for a wide range of industrial applications, especially in the sector of transporting material.

Neobotix is a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, and it created the famous Care-O-Bot, used many times in the Robocup@Home competitions. However, as far as I know, the Care-O-Bot never reached the point of product, even if you can order five of them and get them delivered, running immediately after unpacking.

At present, Neobotix is focusing on selling mobile bases, which can be customized with robotics arms, converting the whole system in a custom mobile manipulator.

The company also sells the mobile bases and the manipulators separately. Examples of mobile bases include Neobotix’s MP series of robots. On the mobile manipulator side, it sells the MM series. All of them work off-the-shelf with ROS.

Even if Neobotix’s products are full products on their own, I see them more as components that we can use for building more complex robots, allowing us to save time creating all the parts. That is why I have decided to put it in the ninth position and not above the other products.

10. Gaitech

Gaitech is a Chinese company that is mainly dedicated to distributing ROS robots, and ROS products in general, in China. from third-party companies. They include many of the companies on this list, including Fetch, Pal, and Robotnik.

However, Gaitech has also developed its own line of robots. For example, the Gapter drone is the only drone I’m aware of that works with ROS off the shelf.

Even if Gaitech’s robots are not very popular in the ROS circuit, I have included them it because at present, it’s the only company in the world that is building ROS–based drones. (Erle Robotics did ROS-based drones in the past, but as far as I know, that ceased when it switched to Acutronic Robotics.) Due to this lack of competition, I think Gaitech deserves the No. 10 position.

I interviewed May Zheng, VP of Marketing of Gaitech, for the ROS Developers podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

Honorable mentions

The following is a shortlist of other companies building ROS robots that did not make it onto the list for certain reasons. They may be here next year!

1. Sony

Sony is a complete newcomer to the world of ROS robots, but it has entered through the big door. Last year, it announced the release of the Aibo robot dog, which fully works on ROS. That was a big surprise to all of us, especially since Sony abandoned the Aibo project back in 2005.

Sony’s revived robot dog could have put it on the list above, except for the fact that the robot is still too new and can only be bought in the U.S. and Japan. Furthermore, the robot still has a very limited programming SDK, so you can barely program it.

If you are interested in the inner workings of Aibo with ROS, have a look at the presentation by Tomoya Fujita, one of the engineers of the project, during the ROS Developers Conference 2019, where he explained the communication mechanism between processes that they had to develop for ROS in order to reduce battery consumption in Aibo. Amazing stuff, fully compatible with ROS nodes and using the standard communication protocol!

2. Ubiquity Robotics

This is a company based on selling simple mobile bases based on ROS for the development of third-party solutions, or as it calls them, “robot applications.” Ubiquity Robotics’ goal is to provide a solid mobile base with off-the-shelf navigation on top of which you can build other solutions like telepresence, robotic waiters, and so on.

Ubiquity Robotics is a young company with a good idea in mind, but it’s very close to existing solutions like Neobotix or Robotnik. Let’s see next year how they have evolved.

I interviewed David Crawley, CEO of Ubiquity, for the ROS Developers podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

3. Acutronic Robotics

This company started building ROS-based drones, but recently, they changed direction to produce hardware ROS microchips. Acutronic produces the MARA robot, an industrial arm based on ROS2 on the H-ROS microchips.

However, as far as I know, the MARA robot is not Acutronics’ main business, since the company created it and sells it as an example of what can be done with H-ROS. That is why I decided not to include this company in the main top 10 list.

By the way, we also collaborated with Acutronic to create a series of videos about how to learn ROS2 using their MARA robot.

I interviewed Victor Mayoral, CEO of Acutronic, for the ROS Developers podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

ROS conclusions

Most of the ROS-based robotics companies are based on wheeled robots. A few exceptions are the humanoid robots of Pal Robotics, the drones of Gaitech, the robotic hands from Shadow Robots, and the robot arms from Neobotix.

It’s very interesting that we see almost no drones and no robotic arms running ROS off the shelf, since both of them are very basic types of robots. There are many robotic arm companies that provide ROS drivers for their robots and many packages for their control, like Universal Robots or Kinova.

But of the listed companies, only Neobotix actually provides an off-the-shelf arm robot with its MM series. I think there is a lot of market space for new ROS-based drones and robotic arms. Take note of that, entrepreneurs of the world!

Finally, I would like to acknowledge that I do not know all the ROS companies out there. Even if I have done my research to create this article, I may have missed some companies worth mentioning. Let me know if you know of or have a company that sells ROS robots and should be on this list, so I can update it and correct any mistakes.

Ricardo Tellez

About the author

Ricardo Tellez is co-founder and CEO of The Construct. Prior to this role, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Robotics Institute of the Spanish Research Council. Tellez worked for more than seven years at Pal Robotics developing humanoid robots, including its navigation system and reasoning engine. He holds a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and aims to create robots that really understand what they are doing. Tellez spoke at the 2019 Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston.

The post Top 10 ROS-based robotics companies in 2019 appeared first on The Robot Report.

2019年7月30日2019年7月30日

Freedom Robotics raises seed funding for robotics dev tools, fleet controls

RMS enables fleet management and troubleshooting. Source: Freedom Robotics

SAN FRANCISCO — Freedom Robotics Inc. today announced that it has closed a $6.6 million seed round. The company provides a cloud-based software development infrastructure for managing fleets of robots.

Freedom Robotics cited a study by the World Economic Forum stating that, by 2025, machines will perform more tasks than humans, creating 58 million jobs worldwide. The company plans to use its funding to build its team and technology.

Freedom Robotics claimed that robotics startups can get their products to market 10 times faster by using its tools to do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” rather than devoting employees to developing a full software stack. The company said its platform-agnostic Robotics Management Software (RMS) provides the “building blocks” for prototyping, building, operating, and scaling robot fleets.

Freedom Robotics builds RMS for developers

“We’ve seen that robotics is hard,” observed Dimitri Onistsuk, co-founder of Freedom Robotics. “In sixth grade, I wrote a letter to myself saying that I would go to MIT, drop out, and found a company that would change the world.”

Onistsuk did go to MIT, drop out, and draw on his experiences with Hans Lee and Joshua Wilson, now chief technology officer and CEO, respectively, at Freedom Robotics.

“We had been building things together before there was a cloud,” recalled Onistsuk. “Now in robotics, very few people have the ability to build a full stack.”

“We see robotics developers who have wonderful applications, like caring for the elderly; transportation; or dull, dirty, and dangerous work,” he said. “Everyone agrees on the value of this area, but they don’t realize the complexity of day-to-day iteration, which requires many engineers and a lot of infrastructure for support.”

“Robotics is like the Web in 2002, where everyone who wants to make an attempt has to raise $10 million and get expert talent in things like computer vision, mechatronics, systems integration, and ROS,” Onistsuk told The Robot Report. “It costs a lot of money to try even once to get a product to market.”

“We’ve combined layers of distinct software services by bringing modern software-development techniques into robotics, which traditionally had a hardware focus,” he said. “You can use one or many — whatever you have to do to scale.”

‘AWS for robots’

Freedom Robotics said that its cloud-based tools can be installed with just a single line of code, and its real-time visualization tools combine robotics management and analysis capabilities that were previously scattered across systems.

“Developers are always trying to improve their processes and learn new things,” said Onistsuk. “Amazon Web Services allows you to bring up a computer with a single line of code. We spent most of the first six months as a company figuring out how to do that for robots. We even bought the domain name ’90 seconds to go.'”

“You can drop in one line of code and immediately see real-time telemetry and have a cloud link to a robot from anywhere in the world,” he said. “Normally, when you want to adopt new components and are just trying to build a robot where the components talk to one another, that can take months.”

“During one on-boarding call, a customer was able to see within two minutes real-time telemetry from robots,” Onistsuk said. “They had never seen sensor-log and live-streaming data together. They thought the video was stuttering, but then an engineer noticed an error in a robot running production software. The bug had already been pushed out to customers. They never had the tools before to see all data in one place in developer-friendly ways.”

“That is the experience we’re getting when building software alongside the people who build robots,” he said. “With faster feedback loops, companies can iterate 10 times faster and move developers to other projects.”

Freedom Robotics’ RMS combines robotics tools to help developers and robotics managers. Source: Freedom Robotics

The same tools for development, management

Onistsuk said that his and Lee’s experience led them to follow standard software-development practices. “Some truths are real — for your core infrastructure, you shouldn’t have to own computers — our software is cloud-based for that reason,” he said.

“We stand on the shoulders of giants and practice what we preach,” Onistsuk asserted. “Pieces of our underlying infrastructure run on standard clouds, and we follow standard ways of building them.”

He said that not only does Freedom Robotics offer standardized development tools; it also uses them to build its RMS.

“With a little thought, for anything that you want to do with our product, you have access to the API calls across the entire fleet,” said Onistsuk. “We used the same APIs to build the product as you would use to run it.”

Resource monitoring with RMS. Source: Freedom Robotics

Investors and interoperability

Initialized Capital led the funding round, with participation from Toyota AI Ventures, Green Cow Venture Capital, Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures, S28 Capital partner Andrew Miklas, and James Lindenbaum. They joined existing investors Kevin Mahaffey, Justin Kan, Matt Brezina, Arianna Simpson, and Josh Buckley.

“We’ll soon reach a point when there are more robots than cell phones, and we’ll need the ‘Microsoft of robotics’ platform to power such a massive market,” said Garry Tan, managing partner at Initialized Capital, which has backed companies such as Instacart, Coinbase, and Cruise.

“Cloud learning will be a game-changer for robotics, allowing the experience of one robot to be ‘taught’ to the rest on the network. We’ve been looking for startups with the technology and market savvy to realize this cloud robotics future through fleet management, control, and analytics,” said Jim Adler, founding managing director at Toyota AI Ventures. “We were impressed with Freedom Robotics’ customer-first, comprehensive approach to managing and controlling fleets of robots and look forward to supporting the Freedom team as they make cloud robotics a market reality.”

“We found out about Toyota AI Ventures through its Twitter account,” said Onistsuk. “We got some referrals and went and met with them. As the founder of multiple companies, Jim [Adler] understood us in a way that industry-specific VCs couldn’t. He got our experience in robotics, building teams, and data analytics.”

What about competing robotics development platforms? “We realized from Day 1 that we shouldn’t be fighting,” Onistsuk replied. “We’re fully integrated with the cloud offerings of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, as well as ROS. We have drop-in compatibility.”

“What we’re trying to power with that is allowing developers to build things that differentiate their products and services and win customers,” he added. “This is similar to our cloud-based strategy. We try to be hardware-agnostic. We want RMS to work out of the box with as many tools and pieces of hardware as possible so that people can try things rapidly.”

Freedom Robotics raises seed funding for robotic dev tools, fleet controls

The Freedom Robotics team has raised seed funding. Source: Freedom Robotics

Hardware gets commoditized

“Hardware is getting commoditized and driving market opportunity,” said Onistsuk. “For instance, desktop compute is only $100 — not just Raspberry Pi, but x86 — you can buy a real computer running a full operating system.”

“Sensors are getting cheaper thanks to phones, and 3D printing will affect actuators. NVIDIA is putting AI into a small, low-power form factor,” he added. “With cheaper components, we’re looking for $5,000 robot arms rather than $500,000 arms, and lots of delivery companies are looking to make a vehicle autonomous and operating at a price point that’s competitive.”

“Companies can use RMS to build their next robots as a service [RaaS], and we’ve worked with everything from the largest entertainment companies to sidewalk delivery startups and multibillion-dollar delivery companies,” Onistsuk said. “Freedom Robotics is about democratizing robotics development and removing barriers to entry so that two guys in a garage can scale out to a business because of demand. The dreams of people with real needs in robotics will cause the next wave of innovation.”

“Software infrastructure is hard to do — we take what many developers consider boring so that they can sell robots into businesses or the home that get better over time,” he said.

‘Inspiring’ feedback

Customer feedback so far has been “overwhelmingly inspiring,” said Onistsuk. “The best moments are getting an e-mail from a customer saying, ‘We’re using your product, and we thought we didn’t want some login or alerting plug-in. We have a demo tomorrow, and it would take four months to build it, but you can do it.'”

“We’ve seen from our interactions that the latest generation of robotics developers has different expectations,” he said. “We’re seeing them ‘skating to where the puck is,’ iterating quickly to build tools and services around our roadmap.”

“The RMS is not just used by developers,” Onistsuk said. “Development, operations, and business teams can find and solve problems in a collaborative way with the visualization tool. We can support teams managing multiple robots with just a tablet, and it integrates with Slack.”

“We can go from high-level data down to CPU utilization,” Lee said. “With one click, you can get a replay of GPS and telemetry data and see every robot with an error. Each section is usually one engineer’s responsibility.”

“A lot of times, people develop robots for university research or an application, but how does the robot perform in the field when it’s in a ditch?” said Lee. “We can enable developers to make sure robots perform better and safer.”

Freedom Robotics is currently being used in industries including agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, and restaurants, among others.

“This is similar to getting dev done in minutes, not months, and it could speed up the entire robotics industry,” Onistsuk added. “Investors are just as excited about the team, scaling the business, and new customers as I am.”

The post Freedom Robotics raises seed funding for robotics dev tools, fleet controls appeared first on The Robot Report.

2019年7月30日2019年7月30日

Acutronic Robotics fails to find funding for H-ROS for robot hardware

Acutronic Robotics today announced on its blog that it is shutting down on July 31. The company, which has offices in Switzerland and Spain, offered communication tools based on the Robot Operating System for modular robot design.

The company, which was founded in 2016 after Acutronic Link Robotics AG’s acquisition of Erle Robotics, said it had been waiting on financing. Acutronic Robotics was developing the Hardware Robot Operating System or H-ROS, a communication bus to enable robot hardware to interoperate smoothly, securely, and safely.

Components of Acutronic’s technology included the H-ROS System on Module (SoM) device for the bus, ROS2 as the “universal robot language” and application programming interface, and the Hardware Robot Information Model (HRIM) as a common ROS dialect.

Acutronic was involved in the development of the open-source ROS2 and was recently named a “Top 10 ROS-based robotics company” for 2019. The company built MARA, the first robot natively running on ROS2.

In January, Acutronic Robotics said that it had made grippers from Robotiq “seamlessly interoperable with all other ROS2-speaking robotic components, regardless of their original manufacturer.”

H-ROS was intended to make robot hardware work together more easily. Source: Acutronic Robotics

Funding challenges

HRIM was funded through the EU’s ROS-Industrial (ROSIN) project, and the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) had invested in H-ROS.

In September 2017, Acutronic raised an unspecified amount of Series A funding led by the Sony Innovation Fund. More recently, however, the company had difficulty finding venture capital.

“We continue to believe that our robot modularity technology and vision are relevant strategically speaking, both product and positioning wise,” stated Victor Mayoral, CEO of Acutronic Robotics. however we probably hit the market too early and fell short of resources.”

According to Acutronic’s blog post, the company received acquisition proposals but was unable to agree to any of them.

The global robot operating system market will experience a compound annual growth rate of 8.8% between 2018 and 2026, predicts Transparency Market Research. However, that forecast includes proprietary industrial software and customized robots.

Other ROS-related news today included Freedom Robotics’ seed funding and Fetch Robotics’ Series C. As The Robot Report previously reported, AWS RoboMaker works with ROS Industrial, and Microsoft recently announced support for ROS in Windows 10.

Uncertain future for Acutronic team

Mayoral didn’t specify what would happen to Acutronic Robotics’ approximately 30 staffers or its intellectual property, but he tried to end on an optimistic note.

“We are absolutely convinced that ROS is a key blueprint for the future of robotics,” Mayoral said. “The ROS robotics community has been a constant inspiration for all of us over these past years, and I’m sure that with the new ROS 2, many more companies will be inspired in the same way. Our team members are excited about their next professional steps, and I’m sure many of us will stay very close to the ROS community.”

The Acutronic Robotics team. Source: Acutronic

The post Acutronic Robotics fails to find funding for H-ROS for robot hardware appeared first on The Robot Report.

2019年7月30日2019年7月30日

TIAGo++ robot from PAL Robotics ready for two-armed tasks

Among the challenges for developers of mobile manipulation and humanoid robots is the need for an affordable and flexible research platform. PAL Robotics last month announced its TIAGo++, a robot that includes two arms with seven degrees of freedom each.

As with PAL Robotics‘ one-armed TIAGo, the new model is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) and can be expanded with additional sensors and end effectors. TIAGo++ is intended to enable engineers to create applications that include a touchscreen interface for human-robot interaction (HRI) and require simultaneous perception, bilateral manipulation, mobility, and artificial intelligence.

In addition, TIAGo++ supports NVIDIA’s Jetson TX2 as an extra for machine learning and deep learning development. Tutorials for ROS and open-source simulation for TIAGo are available online.

Barcelona, Spain-based PAL, which was named a “Top 10 ROS-based robotics company to watch in 2019,” also makes the Reem and TALOS robots.

Jordi Pagès, product manager of the TIAGo robot at PAL Robotics responded to the following questions about TIAGo++ from The Robot Report:

For the development of TIAGo++, how did you collect feedback from the robotics community?

Pagès: PAL Robotics has a long history in research and development. We have been creating service robotics platforms since 2004. When we started thinking about the TIAGo robot development, we asked researchers from academia and industry which features would they expect or value in a platform for research.

Our goal with TIAGo has always been the same: to deliver a robust platform for research that easily adapts to diverse robotics projects and use cases. That’s why it was key to be in touch with the robotics and AI developers from start.

After delivering the robots, we usually ask for feedback and stay in touch with the research centers to learn about their activities and experiences, and the possible improvements or suggestions they would have. We do the same with the teams that use TIAGo for competitions like RoboCup or the European Robotics League [ERL].

At the same time, TIAGo is used in diverse European-funded projects where end users from different sectors, from healthcare to industry, are involved. This allows us to also learn from their feedback and keep finding new ways in which the platform could be of help in a user-centered way. That’s how we knew that adding a second arm into the TIAGo portfolio of its modular possibilities could be of help to the robotics community.

How long did it take PAL Robotics to develop the two-armed TIAGo++ in comparison with the original model?

Pagès: Our TIAGo platform is very modular and robust, so it took us just few months from taking the decision to having a working TIAGo++ ready to go. The modularity of all our robots and our wide experience developing humanoids usually helps us a lot in reducing the redesign and production time.

The software is also very modular, with extensive use of ROS, the de facto standard robotics middleware. Our customers are able to upgrade, modify, and substitute ROS packages. That way, they can focus their attention on their real research on perception, navigation, manipulation, HRI, and AI.

How high can TIAGo++ go, and what’s its reach?

Pagès: TIAGo++ can reach the floor and up to 1.75m [5.74 ft.] high with each arm, thanks to the combination of its 7 DoF [seven degrees of freedom] arms and its lifting torso. The maximum extension of each arm is 92cm [36.2 in.]. In our experience, this workspace allows TIAGo to work in several environments like domestic, healthcare, and industry.

The TIAGo can extend in height, and each arm has a reach of about 3 ft. Source: PAL Robotics

What’s the advantage of seven degrees of freedom for TIAGo’s arms over six degrees?

Pagès: A 7-DoF arm is much better in this sense for people who will be doing manipulation tasks. Adding more DoFs means that the robot can arrive to more poses — positions and orientations — of its arm and end-effector that it couldn’t reach before.

Also, this enables developers to reduce singularities, avoiding non-desired abrupt movements. This means that TIAGo has more possibilities to move its arm and reach a certain pose in space, with a more optimal combination of movements.

What sensors and motors are in the robot? Are they off-the-shelf or custom?

Pagès: All our mobile-based platforms, like the TIAGo robot, combine many sensors. TIAGo has a laser and sonars to move around and localize itself in space, an IMU [inertial measurement unit], and an RGB-D camera in the head. It can have a force/torque sensor on the wrist, especially useful to work in HRI scenarios. It also has a microphone and a speaker.

TIAGo has current sensing in every joint of the arm, enabling a very soft, effortless torque control on each of the arms. The possibility of having an expansion panel with diverse connectors makes it really easy for developers to add even more sensors to it, like a thermal camera or a gripper camera, once they have TIAGo in their labs.

About the motors, TIAGo++ makes use our custom joints integrating high-quality commercial components and our own electronic power management and control. All motors also have encoders to measure the current motor position.

What’s the biggest challenge that a humanoid like TIAGo++ can help with?

Pagès: TIAGo++ can help with are those tasks that require bi-manipulation, in combination with navigation, perception, HRI, or AI. Even though it is true that a one-arm robot can already perform a wide range of tasks, there are many actions in our daily life that require of two arms, or that are more comfortably or quickly done with two arms rather than one.

For example, two arms are good for grasping and carrying a box, carrying a platter, serving liquids, opening a bottle or a jar, folding clothes, or opening a wardrobe while holding an object. In the end, our world and tools have been designed for the average human body, which is with two arms, so TIAGo++ can adapt to that.

As a research platform based on ROS, is there anything that isn’t open-source? Are navigation and manipulation built in or modular?

Pagès: Most software is provided either open-sourced or with headers and dynamic libraries so that customers can develop applications making use of the given APIs or using the corresponding ROS interfaces at runtime.

For example, all the controllers in TIAGo++ are plugins of ros_control, so customers can implement their own controllers following our public tutorials and deploy them on the real robot or in the simulation.

Moreover, users can replace any ROS package by their own packages. This approach is very modular, and even if we provide navigation and manipulation built-in, developers can use their own navigation and manipulation instead of ours.

Did PAL work with NVIDIA on design and interoperability, or is that an example of the flexibility of ROS?

Pagès: It is both an example of how easy is to expand TIAGo with external devices and how easy is to integrate in ROS these devices.

One example of applications that our clients have developed using the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 is the “Bring me a beer” task from the Homer Team [at RoboCup], at the University of Koblenz-Landau. They made a complete application in which TIAGo robot could understand a natural language request, navigate autonomously to the kitchen, open the fridge, recognize and select the requested beer, grasp it, and deliver it back to the person who asked for it.

As a company, we work with multiple partners, but we also believe that our users should be able to have a flexible platform that allows them to easily integrate off-the-shelf solutions they already have.

How much software support is there for human-machine interaction via a touchscreen?

Pagès: The idea behind integrating a touchscreen on TIAGo++ is to bring customers the possibility to implement their own graphical interface, so we provide full access to the device. We work intensively with researchers, and we provide platforms as open as our customers need, such as a haptic interface.

What do robotics developers need to know about safety and security?

Pagès: A list of safety measures and best practices are provided in the Handbook of TIAGo robot in order that customers ensure safety both around the robot and for the robot itself.

TIAGo also features some implicit control modes that help to ensure safety while operation. For example, an effort control mode for the arms is provided so that collisions can be detected and the arm can be set in gravity compensation mode.

Furthermore, the wrist can include a six-axis force/torque sensor providing more accurate feedback about collisions or interactions of the end effector with the environment. This sensor can be also used to increase the safety of the robot. We provide this information to our customers and developers so they are always aware about the safety measures.

Have any TIAGo users moved toward commercialization based on what they’ve learned with PAL’s systems?

Pagès: At the moment, from the TIAGo family, we commercialize the TIAGo Base for intralogistics automation in indoor spaces such as factories or warehouses.

Some configurations of the TIAGo robot have been tested in pilots in healthcare applications. In the EnrichMe H2020 EU Project, the robot gave assistance to old people at home autonomously for up to approximately two months.

In robotics competitions such as the ERL, teams have shown the quite outstanding performance of TIAGo in accomplishing specific actions in a domestic environment. Two teams ended first and third in the RoboCup@Home OPL 2019 in Sydney, Australia. The Homer Team won for the third time in a row using TIAGo — see it clean a toilet here.

The CATIE Robotics Team ended up third in the first world championship in which it participated. For instance, in one task, it took out the trash.

The TIAGo robot is also used for European Union Horizon 2020 experiments in which collaborative robots that combine mobility with manipulation are used in industrial scenarios. This includes projects such as MEMMO for motion generation, Co4Robots for coordination, and RobMoSys for open-source software development.

Besides this research aspect, we have industrial customers that are using TIAGo to improve their manufacturing procedures.

How does TIAGo++ compare with, say, Rethink Robotics’ Baxter?

Pagès: With TIAGo++, besides the platform itself, you also get support, extra advanced software solutions, and assessment from a company that continues to be in the robotics sector since more than 15 years ago. Robots like the TIAGo++ also use our know-how both in software and hardware, a knowledge that the team has been gathering from the development of cutting-edge biped humanoids like the torque-controlled TALOS.

From a technical point of view, TIAGo++ was made very compact to suit environments shared with people such as homes. Baxter was a very nice entry-point platform and was not originally designed to be a mobile manipulator but a fixed one. TIAGo++ can use the same navigation used in our commercial autonomous mobile robot for intralogistics tasks, the TIAGo Base.

Besides, TIAGo++ is a fully customizable robot in all aspects: You can select the options you want in hardware and software, so you get the ideal platform you want to have in your robotics lab. For a mobile manipulator with two 7-DoF arms, force/torque sensors, ROS-based, affordable, and with community support, we believe TIAGo++ should be a very good option.

The TIAGo community is growing around the world, and we are sure that we will see more and more robots helping people in different scenarios very soon.

What’s the price point for TIAGo++?

Pagès: The starting price is around €90,000 [$100,370 U.S.]. It really depends on the configuration, devices, computer power, sensors, and extras that each client can choose for their TIAGo robot, so the price can vary.

The post TIAGo++ robot from PAL Robotics ready for two-armed tasks appeared first on The Robot Report.

2019年5月22日2019年5月22日

Stanford Doggo robot acrobatically traverses tough terrain

Putting their own twist on robots that amble through complicated landscapes, the Stanford Student Robotics club’s Extreme Mobility team at Stanford University has developed a four-legged robot that is not only capable of performing acrobatic tricks and traversing challenging terrain, but is also designed with reproducibility in mind. Anyone who wants their own version of the robot, dubbed Stanford Doggo, can consult comprehensive plans, code and a supply list that the students have made freely available online.

“We had seen these other quadruped robots used in research, but they weren’t something that you could bring into your own lab and use for your own projects,” said Nathan Kau, ’20, a mechanical engineering major and lead for Extreme Mobility. “We wanted Stanford Doggo to be this open source robot that you could build yourself on a relatively small budget.”

Whereas other similar robots can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and require customized parts, the Extreme Mobility students estimate the cost of Stanford Doggo at less than $3,000 — including manufacturing and shipping costs. Nearly all the components can be bought as-is online. The Stanford students said they hope the accessibility of these resources inspires a community of Stanford Doggo makers and researchers who develop innovative and meaningful spinoffs from their work.

Stanford Doggo can already walk, trot, dance, hop, jump, and perform the occasional backflip. The students are working on a larger version of their creation — which is currently about the size of a beagle — but they will take a short break to present Stanford Doggo at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) on May 21 in Montreal.

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A hop, a jump and a backflip

In order to make Stanford Doggo replicable, the students built it from scratch. This meant spending a lot of time researching easily attainable supplies and testing each part as they made it, without relying on simulations.

“It’s been about two years since we first had the idea to make a quadruped. We’ve definitely made several prototypes before we actually started working on this iteration of the dog,” said Natalie Ferrante, Class of 2019, a mechanical engineering co-terminal student and Extreme Mobility Team member. “It was very exciting the first time we got him to walk.”

Stanford Doggo’s first steps were admittedly toddling, but now the robot can maintain a consistent gait and desired trajectory, even as it encounters different terrains. It does this with the help of motors that sense external forces on the robot and determine how much force and torque each leg should apply in response. These motors recompute at 8,000 times a second and are essential to the robot’s signature dance: a bouncy boogie that hides the fact that it has no springs.

Instead, the motors act like a system of virtual springs, smoothly but perkily rebounding the robot into proper form whenever they sense it’s out of position.

Among the skills and tricks the team added to the robot’s repertoire, the students were exceptionally surprised at its jumping prowess. Running Stanford Doggo through its paces one (very) early morning in the lab, the team realized it was effortlessly popping up 2 feet in the air. By pushing the limits of the robot’s software, Stanford Doggo was able to jump 3, then 3½ feet off the ground.

“This was when we realized that the robot was, in some respects, higher performing than other quadruped robots used in research, even though it was really low cost,” recalled Kau.

Since then, the students have taught Stanford Doggo to do a backflip – but always on padding to allow for rapid trial and error experimentation.

Stanford Doggo robot acrobatically traverses tough terrain

Stanford students have developed Doggo, a relatively low-cost four-legged robot that can trot, jump and flip. (Image credit: Kurt Hickman)

What will Stanford Doggo do next?

If these students have it their way, the future of Stanford Doggo in the hands of the masses.

“We’re hoping to provide a baseline system that anyone could build,” said Patrick Slade, graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics and mentor for Extreme Mobility. “Say, for example, you wanted to work on search and rescue; you could outfit it with sensors and write code on top of ours that would let it climb rock piles or excavate through caves. Or maybe it’s picking up stuff with an arm or carrying a package.”

That’s not to say they aren’t continuing their own work. Extreme Mobility is collaborating with the Robotic Exploration Lab of Zachary Manchester, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford, to test new control systems on a second Stanford Doggo. The team has also finished constructing a robot twice the size of Stanford Doggo that can carry about 6 kilograms of equipment. Its name is Stanford Woofer.

Note: This article is republished from the Stanford University News Service.

2019年5月19日2019年5月19日

Techmetics introduces robot fleet to U.S. hotels and hospitals

Fleets of autonomous mobile robots have been growing in warehouses and the service industry. Singapore-based Techmetics has entered the U.S. market with ambitions to supply multiple markets, which it already does overseas.

The company last month launched two new lines of autonomous mobile robots. The Techi Butler is designed to serve hotel guests or hospital patients by interacting with them via a touchscreen or smartphone. It can deliver packages, room-service orders, and linens and towels.

The Techi Cart is intended to serve back-of-house services such as laundry rooms, kitchens, and housekeeping departments.

“Techmetics serves 10 different applications, including manufacturing, casinos, and small and midsize businesses,” said Mathan Muthupillai, founder and CEO of Techmetics. “We’re starting with just two in the U.S. — hospitality and healthcare.”

Building a base

Muthupillai founded Techmetics in Singapore in 2012. “We spent the first three years on research and development,” he told The Robot Report. “By the end of 2014, we started sending out solutions.”

“The R&D team didn’t just start with product development,” recalled Muthupillai. “We started with finding clients first, identified their pain points and expectations, and got feedback on what they needed.”

“A lot of other companies make a robotic base, but then they have to build a payload solution,” he said. “We started with a good robot base that we found and added our body, software layer, and interfaces. We didn’t want to build autonomous navigation from scratch.”

“Now, we’re just getting components — lasers, sensors, motors — and building everything ourselves,” he explained. “The navigation and flow-management software are created in-house. We’ve created our own proprietary software.”

“We have a range of products, all of which use 2-D SLAM [simultaneous localization and mapping], autonomous navigation, and many safety sensors,” Muthupillai added. “They come with three lasers — two vertical and one horizontal for path planning. We’re working on a 3-D-based navigation solution.”

“Our robots are based on ROS [the Robot Operating System],” said Muthupillai. “We’ve created a unique solution that comes with third-party interfaces.”

Techmetics offers multiple robot models for different industries.

Source: Techmetics

Techmetics payloads vary

The payload capacity of Techmetics’ robots depends on the application and accessories and ranges from 250 to 550 lb. (120 to 250 kg).

“The payload and software are based on the behavior patterns in an industry,” said Muthupillai. “In manufacturing or warehousing, people are used to working around robots, but in the service sector, there are new people all the time. The robot must respond to them — they may stay in its path or try to stop it.”

“When we started this company, there were few mobile robots for the manufacturing industry. They looked industrial and had relatively few safety features because they weren’t near people,” he said. “We changed the form factor for hospitality to be good-looking and safer.”

“When we talk with hotels about the Butler robots, they needed something that could go to multiple rooms,” Muthupillai explained. “Usually, staffers take two to three items in a single trip, so if a robot went to only one room and then returned, that would be a waste of time. Our robots have three compartment levels based on this feedback.”

Elevators posed a challenge for the Techi Butler and Techi Cart — not just for interoperability, but also for human-machine interaction, he said.

“Again, people working with robots didn’t share elevators with robots, but in hospitals and hotels, the robot needs to complete its job alongside people,” Muthupillai said. “After three years, we’re still modifying or adding functionalities, and the robots can take an elevator or go across to different buildings.”

“We’re not currently focusing on the supply chain industry, but we will license and launch the base into the market so that third parties can create their own solutions,” he said.

Techmetics' Techi Cart transports linens

Techi Cart transports linens and towels in a hotel or hospital. Source: Techmetics

Differentiators for Techi Butler and Cart

“We provide 10 robot models for four industries — no single company is a competitor for all our markets,” said Muthupillai. “We have three key differentiators.”

“First, customers can engage one vendor for multiple needs, and all of our robots can interact with one another,” he said. “Second, we talk with our clients and are always open to customization — for example, about compartment size — that other’s can’t do.”

“Third, we work across industries and can share our advantages across them,” Muthupillai claimed. “Since we already work with the healthcare industry, we already comply with safety and other regulations.”

“In hospitals or hotels, it’s not just about delivering a product from one point to another,” he said. “We’re adding camera and voice-recognition capabilities. If a robot sees a person who’s lost, it can help them.”

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Distribution and expansion

Techmetics’ mobile robots are manufactured in Thailand. According to Muthupillai, 80% of its robots are deployed in hotels and hospitals, and 20% are in manufacturing. The company already has distributors in Australia, Taiwan, and Thailand, and it is leveraging existing international clients for its expansion.

“We have many corporate clients in Singapore,” Muthupillai said. “The Las Vegas Sands Singapore has deployed 10 robots, and their headquarters in Las Vegas is considering deploying our products.”

“Also, U.K.-based Yotel has two hotels in Singapore, and its London branch is also interested,” he added. “The Miami Yotel is already using our robots, and soon they will be in San Francisco.”

Techmetics has three models for customers to choose from. The first is outright purchase, and the second is a two- or three-year lease. “The third model is innovative — they can try the robots from three to six months or one year and then buy,” Muthupillai said.

Muthupillai said he has moved to Techmetics’ branch office in the U.S. to manage its expansion. “We’ll be doing direct marketing in California, and we’re in the process of identifying partners, especially on the East Coast.”

“Only the theme, colors, or logos changed. No special modifications were necessary for the U.S. market,” he said. “We followed safety regulations overseas, but they were tied to U.S. regulations.”

“We will target the retail industry with a robot concierge, probably by the end of this year,” said Muthupillai. “We will eventually offer all 10 models in the U.S.”

2019年5月1日2019年5月1日

Wenco, Hitachi Construction Machinery announce open ecosystem for autonomous mining

Autonomous mining haulage in Australia. Source: Wenco

TOKYO — Hitachi Construction Machinery Co. last week announced its vision for autonomous mining — an open, interoperable ecosystem of partners that integrate their systems alongside existing mine infrastructure.

Grounded in support for ISO standards and a drive to encourage new entrants into the mining industry, Hitachi Construction Machinery (HCM) said it is pioneering this approach to autonomy among global mining technology leaders. HCM has now publicly declared support for standards-based autonomy and is offering its technology to assist mining customers in integrating new vendors into their existing infrastructure. HCM’s support for open, interoperable autonomy is based on its philosophy for its partner-focused Solution Linkage platform.

“Open innovation is the guiding technological philosophy for Solution Linkage,” said Hideshi Fukumoto, vice president, executive officer, and chief technology officer at HCM. “Based on this philosophy, HCM is announcing its commitment to championing the customer enablement of autonomous mining through an open, interoperable ecosystem of partner solutions.”

“We believe this open approach provides customers the greatest flexibility and control for integrating new autonomous solutions into their existing operations while reducing associated risks and costs of alternative approaches.,” he said.

The HCM Group is developing this open autonomy approach under the Solution Linkage initiative, a platform already available to HCM’s customers in the construction industry now being made available to mining customers with support from HCM subsidiary Wenco International Mining Systems (Wenco).

Three development principles for Wenco, Hitachi

Solution Linkage is a standards-based platform grounded on three principles: open innovation, interoperability, and a partner ecosystem.

In this context, “open innovation” means the HCM Group’s support for open standards to enable the creation of multi-vendor solutions that reduce costs and increase value for customers.

By designing solutions in compliance with ANSI/ISA-95 and ISO standards for autonomous interoperability, Solution Linkage avoids vendor lock-in and offers customers the freedom to choose technologies from preferred vendors independent of their fleet management system, HCM said. This approach future-proofs customer technology infrastructure, providing a phased approach for their incorporation of new technologies as they emerge, claimed the company.

This approach also benefits autonomy vendors who are new to mining, since they will be able to leverage a HCM’s technology and experience in meeting the requirements of mining customers.

The HCM Group’s key capability of interoperability creates simplified connectivity between systems to reduce operational silos, enabling end-to-end visibility and control across the mining value chain. HCM said that customers can use Solution Linkage to connect autonomous equipment from multiple vendors into existing fleet management and operations infrastructure.

The interoperability principle could also provide mines a systems-level understanding of their pit-to-port operation, providing access to more robust data analytics and process management. This capability would enable mine managers to make superior decisions based on operation-wide insight that deliver end-to-end optimization, said HCM.

Wenco and Hitachi have set open interoperability as goals for mining automation

Mining customers think about productivity and profitability throughout their entire operation, from geology to transportation — from pit to port. Source: Wenco

HCM’s said its partner ecosystem will allow customers and third-party partners to use its experience and open platform to successfully provide autonomous functionality and reduce the risk of technological adoption. This initiative is already working with a global mining leader to integrate non-mining OEM autonomous vehicles into their existing mining infrastructure.

Likewise, HCM is actively seeking customer and vendor partnerships to further extend the value of this open, interoperable platform. If autonomy vendors have already been selected by a customer and are struggling to integrate into the client’s existing fleet management system or mine operations, Hitachi may be able to help using the Solution Linkage platform.

The HCM Group will reveal further details of its approach to open autonomy and Solution Linkage in a presentation at the CIM 2019 Convention, running April 28 to May 1 at the Palais de Congrès in Montreal, Canada. Fukumoto and other senior executives from Hitachi and Wenco will discuss this strategy and details of Hitachi’s plans for mining in several presentations throughout the event. The schedule of Hitachi-related events is as follows:

Sunday, April 28, 4:30 PM — A welcome speech at the event’s Opening Ceremonies by Wenco Board Member and HCM Executive Officer David Harvey;
Monday, April 29, 10:00 AM — An Innovation Stage presentation on the Solution Linkage vision for open autonomy by Wenco Board Member and HCM Vice President and Executive Officer, CTO Hideshi Fukumoto;
Monday, April 29, 12:00 PM — Case Study: Accelerating Business Decisions and Mine Performance Through Operational Data Analysis at an Australian Coal Operation technical breakout presentation by Wenco Executive Vice-President of Corporate Strategy Eric Winsborrow;
Monday, April 29, 2:00 PM — Toward an Open Standard in Autonomous Control System Interfaces: Current Issues and Best Practices technical breakout presentation by Wenco Director of Technology Martin Politick;
Tuesday, April 30, 10:00 AM — An Innovation Stage presentation on Hitachi’s vision for data and IoT in mining by Wenco Executive Vice-President of Corporate Strategy Eric Winsborrow;
Wednesday, May 1, 4:00 PM — A concluding speech at the event’s closing luncheon by Wenco Board Member and HCM General Manager of Solution Business Center Yoshinori Furuno.

These presentations further detail the ongoing work of HCM and support the core message about open, interoperable, partner ecosystems.

To learn more about the HCM announcement in support of open and interoperable mining autonomy, Solution Linkage, or other HCM’s solutions, please contact Hitachi Construction Machinery.