A general post talking about random robotics developments taking/took place around the world. This is the first post of this series, so the information may be a little outdated, but will keep improving over time!
Let’s suit up!
Rise of Industrial Robotics
At a cocktail party in 1956, Joseph Engelberger, met inventor George Devol and the two got to talking about George’s latest invention - Programmed Article Transfer device. After almost two years in development, Engelberger and Devol produced a prototype - the Unimate #001. The prototype was first installed on an assembly line at a General Motors diecasting plant in Trenton, New Jersey. From a two-dimensional drawing to an industrial and societal revolution, the Unimate robot remains one of the most significant contributions in the past one hundered years not only to manufacturing but to the civilization.
The first industrial robot
Amazon Picking Challenge
Amazon Robotics, a mobile robotic fulfilment systems manufacturer, conducts the Amazon Picking Challenge. The first Challenge was held during two days at the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The objective of the competition was to provide a challenge problem to the robotics research community that involved integrating the state of the art in object perception, motion planning, grasp planning, and task planning with the long-term goal of warehouse automation. Various teams used different gripper mechanisms, MoveIt! or self designed software packages, sensors to get the job done. Here is a good analysis paper on it! There are a lot of great Youtube videos as well, describing the mechanisms the teams used!
Amazon Pick and Place Challenge
Safer Work Environment
A recent development, (April 2019 should be considered recent) Blue robot is made from bulky, 3D printed parts, with a pair of pincers as end effectors on its humanoid robot arms. The robot can be controlled using VR controllers. Historically, to operate a robot arm, it had to be kept in cages, otherwise humans present in the workspace would be hurt seriously. But Blue is elastic, which is the best part. Due to usage of relatively cheap motors, they are backdrivable, meaning a human can grab the arms and move them around even when the machine is powered off! Check out these links for more information, Link1, Link2, Link3
Blue Robot
Evolutionary Robotics
Development of controllers or hardware for robots, using biological principles of evolution concerns the area of Evolutionary Robotics. Building adaptable robots is one of the greatest potential of this field of Robotics, like Gait Evolution and Damage Recovery. Some other research areas include, Control of Multirobot Systems and Biological Study of evolution. Joshua Bongard, a well renowned name in Evolutionary Robotics, has a really great TEDtalk and MOOC available on Youtube. Also, this is a really great video on coding Genetic Algorithms by Daniel Shiffman.
Robot learnt to walk after taking damage
This is it for this post! Keeping up with latest developments in Robotics/Engineering is also important for a good engineer. I aim to bridge this knowledge through Random Robotics Posts like these!