Robotics is an exciting field, with developments happening all the time, all around the world — including a new exoskeleton design that can help increase walking speed and reduce effort.
Here are 5 recent stories out of the robotics space, including a pilot project involving a humanoid robot, a robot with tentacles, and a call to action against weaponizing robots.
Tackling loneliness with robots
Designed by the team out of GeriPARTy Laboratory, a humanoid robot named Grace will visit a nursing home in Montreal twice a week for the next eight weeks, as part of a pilot project by the city’s Jewish General Hospital.
As the CBC reports, Grace will help keep residents company over 30-minute sessions, helping break social isolation and loneliness — common among seniors — with the ultimate goal of improved mental health. She will generate responses to speech, tell jokes, and do reading exercises, with movement programmed into her eyes, neck, and hands.
According to Dr. Paola Lavin, a research associate at the hospital, staffing shortages mean that robots can fill a critical gap in care, acting as an assistant rather than replacement. “She could be working [throughout] the day without fatigue, without all the mental burden of dealing with very strong emotions as we humans usually do.”
“Looks like curly hair come to life”
A robot hand + something heavy, delicate, or strangely-shaped could be a recipe for disaster…or probably just not work at all. The human hand’s grip — and our opposable thumbs — is quite something, isn’t it?
But a new robotic design out of Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has solved this problem in a very tentacle-like fashion. Or, in this case, a whole mess of small pneumatic tubes that look like a combination of a horror movie’s menacing sea creature mixed with an arcade claw game when in action.
As the team at Harvard explain, typical robotic hands/grippers use embedded sensors, feedback loops, or advanced machine learning algorithms — plus operator skill — to grasp and hold objects. This easier way is actually inspired by nature, or more specifically, jellyfish. Alone their tentacles are quite weak. Together, they can effectively take hold of objects in a variety of shapes and sizes.
Each filament is approximately a foot long, made from hollow rubber, with one side thicker than the other. When pressurized, the tub then “curls like a pigtail,” or as Andrew Liszewsky of Gizmodo describes it, “like curly hair come to life.” In the real world, this could mean a better grip on things like soft fruits and vegetables, delicate tissue in a medical setting, or irregular shaped, delicate objects like glassware in a fulfillment warehouse.
A pledge to push back on robot weaponization
Noted robotics company Boston Dynamics is leading a group of fellow robot-makers to pledge against adding weapons to their creations, and pushing back against those who try to do so.
As reported in an exclusive by Axios, an open letter signed by Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Boston Dynamics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics, and Unitree Robotics highlights the “erosion of consumer trust” in robots as a significant reason for distrust in the idea of weaponization:
“We believe that adding weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public, and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations where people live and work, raises new risks of harm and serious ethical issues.”
In a statement to Axios, Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter emphasizing trust:
“We are concerned about recent increases in makeshift efforts by individuals attempting to weaponize commercially available robots… For this technology to be broadly accepted throughout society, the public needs to know they can trust it. And that means we need policy that prohibits bad actors from misusing it.”
Read the full open letter here.
New robotics facility for Amazon Canada
It’s the first facility of its kind, and one of only five globally, but Amazon Canada’s YOW3 in Barrhaven, Ontario will create more than 2,500 jobs, and allow employees to work alongside cutting-edge technology.
The facility will store up to 20 million items at a time, with Amazon’s ROBIN, RWC4, and Kermit robots operating within. Both ROBIN and RWC4 are robotic arms. The former can segment, grasp, manipulate, identify, and place packages onto a sort bot, while the latter sorts totes and builds pallets.
“By using robots, we can help employees with tasks that involve heavy lifting or repetitive movements,” said Harsh Khaitan of Amazon Canada. “We pilot and implement technology with the goal of increasing safety, improving our employee experience, and delivering for our customers.”
In addition to these robotics, the facility includes Canadian-made semi-automated packing station and stow stations.
A fast-paced robotic system with serious skills
Sure, AI might have the capacity to beat humans at board games, but what about a robot that can hold its own in a ping-pong match?
i-Sim2Real is a robotic system project out of Google. The goal of the project, as reported by TechCrunch, is to build a system that “can work with and around fast-paced and relatively unpredictable human behavior.”
Learn more about the project from the team, and see it in action here:
