分类：robotnews

Ghost Robotics’ Vision 60 quadruped robot can now swim. The Vision 60 can be fully amphibiou when equipped with Onyx Industries’ Nautical Autonomous Unmanned Tail (NAUT).

According to Ghost Robotics, adding NAUT makes Vision 60 the first fully amphibious quadruped. While others have been made waterproof so they can walk through shallow water, Vision 60 is the first to actually swim in water.

Onyx’s NAUT jet propulsion unit can propel a robot at up to 3 knots for around 25 minutes on a single charge, according to reporting from The Drive. The unit operates with Onyx’s proprietary autonomous propulsion method and is plug-and-play for integration into existing networks.

NAUT includes a semi-autonomous control system that allows an operator to control the robot remotely or have it execute pre-programed missions autonomously. According to Onyx, NAUT can be added to any IP67 or above rated platform.

Vision 60 is a mid-sized, high-endurance quadruped intended for use in defense, homeland and enterprise applications. The robot is agile and durable enough to survive all-weather conditions in a wide range of environments. The quadruped can walk at up to 3 m/s and run for three hours or travel 10 km on a single charge.

Ghost Robotics has shipped over 200 Vision 60 robots or over 25 national security customers, among others. The company was founded in 2015 by Avik De, Gavin Kenneally and Jiren Parikh. 

Onyx and Ghost Robotics unveiled the collaboration at the 2022 Special Operations Forces Industry Conference. 

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Canonical today announced that Ubuntu Core 22, the fully containerized Ubuntu 22.04 LTS variant optimized for IoT and edge devices, is now generally available for download. This release brings Ubuntu’s operating system (OS) and services to a complete range of embedded and IoT devices.

“Our goal at Canonical is to provide secure, reliable open source everywhere – from the development environment to the cloud, down to the edge and to devices,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “With this release, and Ubuntu’s real-time kernel, we are ready to expand the benefits of Ubuntu Core across the entire embedded world.”

Real-time compute support
The Ubuntu 22.04 LTS real-time kernel, now available in beta, delivers high performance, low latency and workload predictability for time-sensitive industrial, telco, automotive and robotics use cases.

The new release includes a fully preemptible kernel to ensure time-bound responses. Canonical partners with silicon and hardware manufacturers to enable advanced real-time features out of the box on Ubuntu Certified Hardware.

Application-centric
Ubuntu Core provides a fully containerized Ubuntu, which breaks down the monolithic Ubuntu image into packages known as snaps – including the kernel, OS and applications. Each snap has an isolated sandbox that includes the application’s dependencies, to make it fully portable and reliable. Canonical’s Snapcraft framework enables on-rails snap development for rapid iteration, automated testing and reliable deployment.

The system offers transactional mission-critical over-the-air (OTA) updates of the kernel, OS and applications – updates will always complete successfully, or roll back automatically to the previous working version, so a device cannot be “bricked ” by an incomplete update. Snaps also provide delta updates to minimise network traffic, and digital signatures to ensure software integrity and provenance.

Ubuntu Core also provides advanced security features out of the box, including secure boot, full disk encryption, secure recovery and strict confinement of the OS and applications.

Customers benefit from Canonical’s 10 years security maintenance of kernel, OS and application-level code, enabling devices and their applications to meet enterprise and public sector requirements for digital safety.

Partner ecosystem
Partnerships with leading silicon and hardware partners, including Advantech, Lenovo and many others, have established Ubuntu Core’s presence in the market.

The Ubuntu Certified Hardware program defines a range of off-the-shelf IoT and edge devices trusted to work with Ubuntu. The program uniquely includes continuous testing of certified hardware at Canonical’s labs with every security update over the full lifecycle of the device.

“Advantech provides embedded, industrial, IoT and automation solutions. We continue to strengthen our participation in the Ubuntu Certified Hardware Program. Canonical ensures that certified hardware goes through an extensive testing process and provides a stable, secure, and optimized Ubuntu Core to reduce time to market and development costs for our customers.” said Eric Kao, Director of Advantech WISE-Edge+.

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Just like us, robots can't see through walls. Sometimes they need a little help to get where they're going.

In forests where the foliage is thick, it can be challenging to detect and track moving targets, such as people and animals, using the current technology for collecting aerial images and videos. Researchers have developed a drone-operated 1D camera array that uses airborne optical sectioning to detect and track moving people in a dense forest. This new technique can be a helpful addition to the technology used in search and rescue missions.

Researchers at MIT have developed a technique that can guide an autonomous robot through unknown environmental conditions. The technique helps a robot avoid obstacles without knowing the size, shape or location of what it could encounter. 

The research team hopes that its findings could help autonomous robots explore remote exoplanets where the robot, and the researchers who programmed it, don’t know what it will encounter on the planet. 

“Future robotic space missions need risk-aware autonomy to explore remote and extreme worlds for which only highly uncertain prior knowledge exists. In order to achieve this, trajectory-planning algorithms need to reason about uncertainties and deal with complex uncertain models and safety constraints,” co-lead author on the paper, Ashkan Jasour, said. 

MIT’s team couldn’t use typical trajectory planning methods that make assumptions about the vehicle, obstacles and environment. These methods are too simplistic for real-world settings. Instead, the team developed an algorithm that could determine the probability of observing different conditions or obstacles at different locations.

The algorithm determines the probability of these events based on a map or images the robot collects with its perception system. This approach formulates trajectory planning as a probabilistic optimization problem, a mathematical programming framework which lets the robot achieve planning objectives while avoiding obstacles. 

“Our challenge was how to reduce the size of the optimization and consider more practical constraints to make it work. Going from good theory to good application took a lot of effort,” Jasour said.

The researchers then used higher-order statistics of probability distributions of the uncertainties to convert the probabilistic optimization problem into a more straightforward deterministic optimization problem. This kind of problem could be solved efficiently with off-the-shelf solves. 

MIT’s team tested their technique with simulated navigation scenarios. In an underwater model where the algorithms needed to chart a course from an uncertain position, around obstacles and to a goal region. The system could safely reach the goal 99% of the time. Depending on how complex the environment is, the algorithm can plan a safe course in seconds or minutes. 

The next step for the team is to create more efficient processes that significantly reduces runtime. Co-authors on the paper include Jasour, former Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) research scientist who now works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, and Weiqiao Ham, a graduate student in the department of electrical engineering and computer science and member of CSAIL. Senior author on the paper was Brian Williams, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and a member of CSAIL. 

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