Video Friday: Robots Help Keep Medical Staff Safe at COVID-19 Hospital

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):

HRI 2020 - March 23-26, 2020 - [ONLINE EVENT] ICARSC 2020 - April 15-17, 2020 - [ONLINE EVENT] ICRA 2020 - May 31-4, 2020 - [SEE ATTENDANCE SURVEY] ICUAS 2020 - June 9-12, 2020 - Athens, Greece CLAWAR 2020 - August 24-26, 2020 - Moscow, Russia

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

UBTECH Robotics' ATRIS, AIMBOT, and Cruzr robots were deployed at a Shenzhen hospital specialized in treating COVID-19 patients. The company says the robots, which are typically used in retail and hospitality scenarios, were modified to perform tasks that can help keep the hospital safer for everyone, especially front-line healthcare workers. The tasks include providing videoconferencing services between patients and doctors, monitoring the body temperatures of visitors and patients, and disinfecting designated areas.

The Third People's Hospital of Shenzhen (TPHS), the only designated hospital for treating COVID-19 in Shenzhen, a metropolis with a population of more than 12.5 million, has introduced an intelligent anti-epidemic solution to combat the coronavirus.

AI robots are playing a key role. The UBTECH-developed robot trio, namely ATRIS, AIMBOT, and Cruzr, are giving a helping hand to monitor body temperature, detect people without masks, spray disinfectants and provide medical inquiries.

[ UBTECH ]

Someone has spilled gold all over the place! Probably one of those St. Paddy's leprechauns... Anyways... It happened near a Robotiq Wrist Camera and Epick setup so it only took a couple of minutes to program and ''pick and place'' the mess up.

Even in situations like these, it's important to stay positive and laugh a little, we had this ready and though we'd still share. Stay safe!

[ Robotiq ]

HEBI Robotics is helping out with social distancing by controlling a robot arm in Austria from their lab in Pittsburgh.

Can't be too careful!

[ HEBI Robotics ]

Thanks Dave!

SLIDER, a new robot under development at Imperial College London, reminds us a little bit of what SCHAFT was working on with its straight-legged design.

[ Imperial ]

Imitation learning is an effective and safe technique to train robot policies in the real world because it does not depend on an expensive random exploration process. However, due to the lack of exploration, learning policies that generalize beyond the demonstrated behaviors is still an open challenge. We present a novel imitation learning framework to enable robots to 1) learn complex real world manipulation tasks efficiently from a small number of human demonstrations, and 2) synthesize new behaviors not contained in the collected demonstrations. Our key insight is that multi-task domains often present a latent structure, where demonstrated trajectories for different tasks intersect at common regions of the state space. We present Generalization Through Imitation (GTI), a two-stage offline imitation learning algorithm that exploits this intersecting structure to train goal-directed policies that generalize to unseen start and goal state combinations.

[ GTI ]

Here are two excellent videos from UPenn's Kod*lab showing the capabilities of their programmable compliant origami spring things.

[ Kod*lab ]

We met Bornlove when we were reporting on drones in Tanzania in 2018, and it's good to see that he's still improving on his built-from-scratch drone.

[ ADF ]

Laser. Guided. Sandwich. Stacking.

[ Kawasaki ]

The Self-Driving Car Research Studio is a highly expandable and powerful platform designed specifically for academic research. It includes the tools and components researchers need to start testing and validating their concepts and technologies on the first day, without spending time and resources on building DYI platforms or implementing hobby-level vehicles. The research studio includes a fleet of vehicles, software tools enabling researchers to work in Simulink, C/C++, Python, or ROS, with pre-built libraries and models and simulated environments support, even a set of reconfigurable floor panels with road patterns and a set of traffic signs. The research studio's feature vehicle, QCar, is a 1/10 scale model vehicle powered by NVIDIA Jetson TX2 supercomputer and equipped with LIDAR, 360-degree vision, depth sensor, IMU, encoders, and other sensors, as well as user-expandable IO.

[ Quanser ]

Thanks Zuzana!

The Swarm-Probe Enabling ATEG Reactor, or SPEAR, is a nuclear electric propulsion spacecraft that uses a new, lightweight reactor moderator and advanced thermoelectric generators (ATEGs) to greatly reduce overall core mass. If the total mass of an NEP system could be reduced to levels that were able to be launched on smaller vehicles, these devices could deliver scientific payloads to anywhere in the solar system.

One major destination of recent importance is Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, which may contain traces of extraterrestrial life deep beneath the surface of its icy crust. Occasionally, the subsurface water on Europa violently breaks through the icy crust and bursts into the space above, creating a large water plume. One proposed method of searching for evidence of life on Europa is to orbit the moon and scan these plumes for ejected organic material. By deploying a swarm of Cubesats, these plumes can be flown through and analyzed multiple times to find important scientific data.

[ SPEAR ]

This hydraulic cyborg hand costs just $35.

Available next month in Japan.

[ Elekit ]

Microsoft is collaborating with researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University to compete in the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) challenges, collectively named Team Explorer. These challenges are designed to test drones and robots on how they perform in hazardous physical environments where humans can't access safely. By participating in these challenges, these teams hope to find a solution that will assist emergency first responders to help find survivors more quickly.

[ Team Explorer ]

Aalborg University Hospital is the largest hospital in the North Jutland region of Denmark. Up to 3,000 blood samples arrive here in the lab every day. They must be tested and sorted - a time-consuming and monotonous process which was done manually until now. The university hospital has now automated the procedure: a robot-based system and intelligent transport boxes ensure the quality of the samples - and show how workflows in hospitals can be simplified by automation.

[ Kuka ]

This video shows human-robot collaboration for assembly of a gearbox mount in a realistic replica of a production line of Volkswagen AG. Knowledge-based robot skills enable autonomous operation of a mobile dual arm robot side-by-side of a worker.

[ DFKI ]

A brief overview of what's going on in Max Likhachev's lab at CMU.

Always good to see PR2 keeping busy!

[ CMU ]

The Intelligent Autonomous Manipulation (IAM) Lab at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Robotics Institute brings together researchers to address the challenges of creating general purpose robots that are capable of performing manipulation tasks in unstructured and everyday environments. Our research focuses on developing learning methods for robots to model tasks and acquire versatile and robust manipulation skills in a sample-efficient manner.

[ IAM Lab ]

Jesse Hostetler is an Advanced Computer Scientist in the Vision and Learning org at SRI International in Princeton, NJ. In this episode of The Dish TV they explore the different aspects of artificial intelligence, and creating robots that use sleep and dream states to prevent catastrophic forgetting.

[ SRI ]

On the latest episode of the AI Podcast, Lex interviews Anca Dragan from UC Berkeley.

Anca Dragan is a professor at Berkeley, working on human-robot interaction -- algorithms that look beyond the robot's function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that accounts for interaction and coordination with human beings.

[ AI Podcast ]