The latest robots, innovations and technologies of the
future, and it’s worth looking forward to 2021! All beautiful things in the
world of high technology in one edition!
The smart and dexterous Bot Handy can determine what material an object
is made of in order to calculate the
force required to manipulate it.
The robot can pick up laundry, load the dishwasher, set the table, pour wine and even bring you drinks. Cameras on the robot's head and limbs are responsible for object recognition. For manipulation - the only robotic arm, which can rotate at three points - in fact, in the shoulder, elbow and wrist.
The arm ends with a universal grip that works with objects of different sizes and shapes. The robot can move around the room on a platform, turn from side to side and rise to reach higher objects. And for everyday cleaning, Samsung introduced the JetBot 90 AI Plus robot. It's a vacuum cleaner that uses LiDAR and a 3D sensor to clean close to furniture and children's toys, but away from vases and pet poop.
The JetBot's internal camera can be used to monitor pets. A recent reality has been a Moley Robotics' futuristic robotic kitchen project. Not as futuristic as the concept, the robotic kitchen is already quite functional. The system is sold together with furniture and utensils, as everything is adapted for optimal robotics work based on proven industrial manipulators. The specially designed gripper can not only use spatulas and ladles, but also, for example, break eggs, use a blender or turn on the water tap.
The robot takes ingredients from human-prepared containers. But beyond that, the entire cooking process is fully automated. The robot was trained with the help of camera recording of the cooking process and its verbal description. Breaking down the recipe into simple steps, such as stir, flip, salt, makes it fairly easy to teach the robot new dishes.
The Toyota Research Institute showed its version of home robots not so long ago. The company's engineers are trying to solve two problems: to teach robots to perform everyday tasks around the house, and to overcome the limitations imposed by the unpredictable environment of each individual home. The latter task is partly solved by Toyota's new robot hanging from the ceiling. But it is also unlikely to be implemented in existing modest-sized Japanese dwellings.
Rather, these are developments for future homes and apartments. Toyota is not saying much about the technology behind the robot, but it recently showed off its new lab, which was created to test the robot. The Chinese Institute of Industrial Technology introduced this year the Dual Arm Robot System, a robotic system with two arms. The total number of joints is 29!
The dexterous arms with five fingers and seven degrees of freedom can easily manipulate objects of different shapes and sizes. And they're made of composite material, which makes the robot lightweight, but durable. This year, Agility Robotics has seriously upgraded its humanoid robot courier Digit, making it completely self-sufficient. All you need to do is tell the robot the route or the end point and it will go where it needs to go, bypassing obstacles.
Digit is the world's first commercially available humanoid robot with two legs. Its price is unknown, but it is rumored to have six figures. The robot can lift weights up to 18 kilograms, gently bypassing people and interacting with other robots. Digit's main customer today is Ford. The company plans to use the robot for deliveries, in conjunction with its unmanned car.
The robot uses LIDAR and multiple cameras mounted on its torso to scan its surroundings and quickly detect obstacles. From humanoid robots let's move on to four-legged robots. A new and rather unusual robot-dog was introduced this year by Ten cent. The robot-dog Max uses the original leg and wheel connection scheme from Tencent Robotics X Lab, which allows him to both walk on 4 legs and ride on wheels at 25 km/h. Tencent's software and hardware platform allows the robot to react to its surroundings and control its own balance, as well as plan actions with a calculation delay of only 0.3 milliseconds. The robot can also stand up after a fall. Another novelty was a Chinese copy of the Boston Dynamics robot-dog.
The Welian company introduced the Alpha Dog robot, which is able to move at a speed of up to 1 km/h, move with 10 gaits, and carry a load of up to 5 kg. The robot is able to move autonomously avoiding obstacles, maintain balance, get up after a fall, and, according to the manufacturer, perform a number of tasks using artificial intelligence. For example, to serve as a guide for the blind, to guard homes, or to patrol a park.
It has already sold about 2,000 units at a price of just under $2,500. Boston Dynamics itself this year also introduced a couple of new products. Specifically, a brand new robot for warehouses Stretch and an updated version of the robot Spot with an incredibly nimble and smart robotic arm. We talked more about them in an issue about all of the company's robots, which you can see at the link in the hint and video description.
An unusual four-legged novelty of the year was Hyundai's Tiger X-1 robotic courier for hard-to-reach and remote locations. The robot is dropped off in the right area by a drone, and then rides on wheels and rises on its feet to step over obstacles if necessary. The top of the robot can easily be replaced with a refrigerator or a regular box. The robot has only a prototype so far, but it seems that Hyundai is serious about its development and plans to bring it to a commercial version.
We couldn't forget to mention this year's protagonist, the Martian drone Ingenuity. Although it is not exactly a robot, the vehicle opened a new milestone in the history of exploration of other planets and is definitely worth mentioning. The Mars drone has already made 4 autonomous flights in the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet, the density of which is only 1% of Earth's. It is not equipped with any scientific instruments, except laser altimeter, gyrostabilizer and video cameras.
One camera is responsible for navigation, i.e. determining location, direction and speed. The second camera is a 13 MP color camera. It will take pictures of the surface of Mars. Helicopter communication with Earth is carried out through the rover. The mass of Ingenuity on Earth is 1.8 kg, and on Mars - about 0.7 kg.
The helicopter is lifted into the air by two propellers, each 1.2 meters long and weighing only 35 g. They are made of carbon fiber and covered with solar panels for recharging the drone. A pair of parallel-mounted propellers rotates in opposite directions around a common axis at about 2300-2900 revolutions per minute. By comparison, terrestrial helicopters make 500 revolutions per minute.
Earth-based robots have made their mark this year as well. Carbon Robotics unveiled a robot for destroying weeds with a laser. This autonomous robot uses computer vision, a powerful lighting system that allows the robot to accurately identify weeds at any time of day, as well as eight 15-watt carbon dioxide lasers. The robot weeds 6.5 hectares per day Australia is testing an apple picking robot.
The robot uses a combination of cameras and deep-learning algorithms to scan trees and detect fruit, which requires it to process information about its shape, orientation and branch location. The robot grips apples with a specially designed pneumatically operated soft grip that does not injure the fruit. The gripper can retrieve more than 85 percent of all apples on a tree, and the robot itself can identify more than 90 percent of the apples in its camera field of view at a distance of just over 1 meter.
The machine can operate in all light and weather conditions at a speed of 7 seconds per apple. Construction robots also made their mark this year. There were no such spectacular ones as the HRP-5P. But the Baubot from the Australian startup Print stones also looks good. It is an electrically-driven robot that reaches its destination on cross-country tracks at a speed of just over 3 km/h. It can overcome stairs and thresholds, carry loads of up to 500 kg and work for 8 hours without recharging.
Baubot can be controlled from the display on the robot and from a smartphone, as well as by setting points on a pre-made map. The robot is equipped with cameras, its own lighting and a robotic arm with a range of up to 1 meter and an accuracy tolerance of less than 1 mm. The robot arm is designed to handle a variety of tools and can both wrap a screw or weld metal and lay bricks. In the future, after thousands of hours of training in simulation, the robot will be able to work not only with humans but also with other robots.
And a human would only have to observe the construction. Another major discovery in robotics this year was microscopic robots capable of becoming medical instruments. The robots, created at Cornell University, are about five microns thick and 40 microns wide. Equipped with feet the size of a few tens of atoms, they can move with laser pulses and interact directly with human body cells. The robots are resistant to a variety of environments, including extreme acidity and temperatures. But most importantly, it is fast and easy enough to produce them. In theory, they can both heal wounds and form polymer shells around tumors, preventing them from growing. It is impossible to cover all the inventions and technologies of the future that are already being developed today in one issue.
