Daily Archives: November 12, 2019

November 11, 2019Bryan Hellman

The modern production floor is changing rapidly as robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence converge to enhance productivity in the manufacturing sector. One of the key drivers of convergence is the combination of technological advancements in robotics and communication technologies, which has led to an expansion in applications including wireless interfaces in industrial robotics.

The first industrial robot was a robotic arm called Unimate #001, which relied on hydraulic actuators for control. Industrial robotics advanced further in the 1970s with the invention of programmable logic controllers (PLCs). During this period, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) was one-directional, where controllers pressed buttons, and the robots responded.

In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s progressed, the introduction of wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 3G and 4G (and soon, 5G) wide-area wireless networks transformed HRI into a two-way communications system. In addition, different ways for humans to interact with robots also evolved.

A graphic user interface enables the user to control the robot using pictures or images displayed on the screen of the device. The images are captured by a camera mounted on the robot and transmitted to the user. The advantages of the graphic user interface include its ability to make human-robot interaction more intuitive and engaging. GUI devices provide data from sensors, which is vital for decision-making. It also restricts users input to valid ranges or units, which enhances accuracy in execution. The only disadvantage of the GUI is that it can contain complex and contradicting graphical interfaces that require a user to learn both the complicated commands and the robots hardware and software to operate.

Yaskawa Motomans Smart Pendant, seen here with a GP8 robot, aims to ease robot control functions. Source: Yaskawa Motomon

A perfect example of the application of GUI is the Flexible Graphic User Interface (FlexGUI), developed by PPM AS and NACHI of Norway and Japan. This interface bridges the gap between humans and robots by enhancing the learning process of the robot to elevate it to the level of its human controller. Another successful application of GUI similar to FlexGUI is the FlexPendant developed by ABB under its Robot Application Builder (RAB). Both FlexPendant and FlexGUI offer users the option to customize their own graphics interfaces, and they can be developed as a personal computer or a teach pendant.

An in-depth analysis of both applications of GUI highlights that FlexGUI is more flexible, user-friendly, and advanced than FlexPendant. This is because FlexGUI provides an easily accessible interface for learners with the option to upgrade to advanced functionality. This is a major advantage over FlexPendant, particularly for trainees and recruits who need time to learn basic operations of industrial robots before attempting advanced functionality. Also, FlexGUIs interface grants users a custom-created screen for every industrial cell, as well as action buttons and monitoring tools that can easily be customized by the user based on task and priority.

Command language interface requires the user to use existing programming languages to control the robot. The first advantage of CLI is that it is easy to execute commands once users learn the programming language. Second, unlike other interfaces that require controllers to understand and remember several steps, CLI requires the user to understand only the programming language.

Disadvantages of this command interface include the fact that some CLI devices contain complex command interfaces that require the user to learn both the complicated commands as well as detailed information about the robots hardware and software. In addition, a mix-up in the command language can be disastrous for the system.

This type of interface, where a human uses something similar to a video game controller (and in some cases, an actual video game controller), offers an accurate and real-time view of the environment, as the user is maneuvering the robot through obstacles to accomplish the tasks.

The Monarch Platform controller by Auris Health directs doctors to use the robot via a controller. Image: Auris Health

One recent example is the successful trial of BVLOS drones using 4G cellular connectivity to deliver medical supplies. The trial displayed the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) installed with an onboard Internet of Things (IoT) router. The router enabled LTE cellular connectivity for video and control data between the UAV and its pilot. The trial provided an insight into potential future applications of the user interfaces in industrial robotics. It showed that the wireless interfaces can be modified to ensure robots learn from users, which will allow the increase of the intelligence of robots and reduce the need for controllers. Devices that use this type of interface require highly skilled workers to accomplish tasks, which is a major disadvantage. For example, the user flying the BVLOS drone during the trial required skills comparable to that of a pilot for the users to complete the tasks, and this prevents untrained professionals from using the robots.

A gesture-based interface enables users to operate industrial robots using hand gestures, where arm direction commands a specific movement on the robot. This is the most straight-forward and the easiest of all the other interfaces. The gesture interface requires that both the robot and the human are in the same place when the robot undertakes the tasks, which can limit its usage in situations where the robot is in a dangerous location. In addition, gesturing continuously can become tiring for humans after some time.

In this video example, MIT CSAIL researchers show how a robot can be supervised through brain and muscle signals:

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has enabled expedient control of industrial robots using voice by allowing the conversion of speech into text. Voice control uses a graphic user interface (GUI) with a microphone to communicate commands and a display to view feedback. The speech signal is captured, filtered, converted into text, and matched with preprogrammed text commands by the processor.

Voice control procedure for industrial robots uses the defined syntax of commands starting with a trigger word such as Robot One, which activates speech recognition. The robot replies by sending the text Yes Master. Subsequently, the user utters preprogrammed command words, for example, Move to Origin which commands the robot to move back to the start of the assembly-line.

Future applications of interfaces in industrial robotics will rely heavily on data processing technologies with IoT and cyber-physical system (CPS) serving as neural networks for smart factories and manufacturing. Technological advancements in the future will facilitate total interconnection, where interfaces consist of smart control systems, sensors, communication systems, embedded terminals, and CPS, which will ensure interconnection between robots and all other equipment in the factory.

Wireless interfaces may also be applied in the future to attain total integration, using smart networks established under CPS to achieve total connectivity between humans and industrial robots, as well as between other robots and equipment.

Read this article:

How Humans Tell Robots What to Do - Robotics Business Review

The use of robotics in business continues to grow at a steady pace. Tom Merritt explains five things you should know about the robots market.

Automation is used as a scare word, but just being scared of it can lead to just as much of a problem as not being prepared for it. How strong are robots? Let's find out five things to know about the robots market.

SEE: Special report: A guide to data center automation (Free PDF) (ZDNet) | Download the free PDF (TechRepublic)

As with all stories on automation and robots, we should take seriously the displacement caused and find serious solutions for people who will lose their jobs, while still maintaining the benefits that can provide the resources to help them.

Be in the know about smart cities, AI, Internet of Things, VR, autonomous driving, drones, robotics, and more of the coolest tech innovations. Delivered Wednesdays and Fridays

Image: iStockphoto/ipopba

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Top 5 things to know about the robots market - TechRepublic

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Global Inspection Robotics in Oil and Gas Market 2019 Development Status and Future Statistics by 2024 - Eastlake Times

An expensive experiment in global distribution has been abandoned by Adidas, which has announced that will close its robotic Speedfactories in Atlanta and Ansbach, Germany, within 6 months. The company sugar-coated the news with a promise to repurpose the technology used at its existing human-powered factories in Asia.

The factories were established in 2016 (Ansbach) and 2017 (Atlanta) as part of a strategy to decentralize its manufacturing processes. The existing model, like so many other industries, is to produce the product in eastern Asia, where labor and overhead is less expensive, then ship it as needed. But this is a slow and clumsy model for an industry that moves as quickly as fashion and athletics.

Right now, most of our products are made out of Asia and we put them on a boat or on a plane so they end up on Fifth Avenue, said Adidas CMO Eric Liedtke in an interview last year at Disrupt SF about new manufacturing techniques. The Speedfactories were intended to change that: Instead of having some sort of micro-distribution center in Jersey, we can have a micro-factory in Jersey.

Ultimately this seems to have proven more difficult than expected. As other industries have found in the rush to automation, its easy to overshoot the mark and overcommit when the technology just isnt ready.

Robotic factories are a powerful tool but difficult to quickly reconfigure or repurpose, since it takes specialty knowledge to set up racks of robotic arms, computer vision systems, and so on. Robotics manufacturers are making advances in this field, but for now its a whole lot harder than training a human workforce to use standard tools on a different pattern.

In a press release, Adidas global operations head Martin Shankland explained that The Speedfactories have been instrumental in furthering our manufacturing innovation and capabilities, and that for a short time they even brought products to market in a hurry. That was our goal from the start, he says, though presumably things played out a bit differently in the pitch decks from 2016.

We very much regret that our collaboration in Ansbach and Atlanta has come to an end, Shankland said. Oechsler, the high-tech manufacturing partner that Adidas worked with, feels the same. Whilst we understand adidas reasons for discontinuing Speedfactory production at Oechsler, we regret this decision, said the companys CEO, Claudius Kozlik, in the press release. The factories will shut down by April, presumably eliminating or shifting the 160 or so jobs they provided, but the two companies will continue to work together.

The release says that Adidas will use its Speedfactory technologies to produce athletic footwear at two of its suppliers in Asia starting next year. Its not really clear what that means, and Ive asked the company for further information.

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Adidas backpedals on robotic shoe production with Speedfactory closures - TechCrunch

Robots used to be restricted to heavy lifting or fine detail work in factories. Now Boston Dynamics nimble four-legged robot, Spot, is available for companies to lease to carry out various real-world jobs, a sign of just how common interactions between humans and machines have become in recent years.

And while Spot is versatile and robust, its what society thinks of as a traditional robot, a mix of metal and hard plastic. Many researchers are convinced that soft robots capable of safe physical interaction with people for example, providing in-home assistance by gripping and moving objects will join hard robots to populate the future.

Soft robotics and wearable computers, both technologies that are safe for human interaction, will demand new types of materials that are soft and stretchable and perform a wide variety of functions. My colleagues and I at the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon University develop these multifunctional materials. Along with collaborators, weve recently developed one such material that uniquely combines the properties of metals, soft rubbers and shape memory materials.

These soft multifunctional materials, as we call them, conduct electricity, detect damage and heal themselves. They also can sense touch and change their shape and stiffness in response to electrical stimulation, like an artificial muscle. In many ways, its what the pioneering researchers Kaushik Bhattacharya and Richard James described: the material is the machine.

Making Materials Intelligent

This idea that the material is the machine can be captured in the concept of embodied intelligence. This term is usually used to describe a system of materials that are interconnected, like tendons in the knee. When running, tendons can stretch and relax to adapt each time the foot strikes the ground, without the need for any neural control.

Its also possible to think of embodied intelligence in a single material one that can sense, process and respond to its environment without embedded electronic devices like sensors and processing units.

A simple example is rubber. At the molecular level, rubber contains strings of molecules that are coiled up and linked together. Stretching or compressing rubber moves and uncoils the strings, but their links force the rubber to bounce back to its original position without permanently deforming. The ability for rubber to know its original shape is contained within the material structure.

Since engineered materials of the future that are suitable for human-machine interaction will require multifunctionality, researchers have tried to build new levels of embodied intelligence beyond just stretching into materials like rubber. Recently, my coworkers created self-healing circuits embedded in rubber.

They started by dispersing micro-scale liquid metal droplets wrapped in an electrically insulating skin throughout silicone rubber. In its original state, the skins thin metal oxide layer prevents the metal droplets from conducting electricity.

However, if the metal-embedded rubber is subjected to enough force, the droplets will rupture and coalesce to form electrically conductive pathways. Any electrical lines printed in that rubber become self-healing. In a separate study, they showed that the mechanism for self-healing could also be used to detect damage. New electrical lines form in the areas that are damaged. If an electrical signal gets through, that indicates the damage.

The combination of liquid metal and rubber gave the material a new route to sense and process its environment that is, a new form of embodied intelligence. The rearrangement of the liquid metal allows the material to know when damage has occurred because of an electrical response.

Shape memory is another example of embodied intelligence in materials. It means materials can reversibly change to a prescribed form. Shape memory materials are good candidates for linear motion in soft robotics, able to move back and forth like your bicep muscle. But they also offer unique and complex shape-changing capabilities.

For example, two groups of materials scientists recently demonstrated how a class of materials could reversibly transform from a flat rubber-like sheet into a 3-D topographical map of a face. Its a feat that would be difficult with traditional motors and gears, but its simple for this class of materials due to the materials embodied intelligence. The researchers used a class of materials known as liquid crystal elastomers, which are sometimes described as artificial muscles because they can extend and contract with the application of a stimulus like heat, light, or electricity.

Putting It All Together

By drawing inspiration from the liquid metal composite and the shape-morphing material, my colleagues and I recently created a soft composite with unprecedented multifunctionality.

It is soft and stretchable, and it can conduct heat and electricity. It can actively change its shape, unlike regular rubber. Since our composite easily conducts electricity, the shape-morphing can be activated electrically. Since it is soft and deformable, it is also resilient to significant damage. Because it can conduct electricity, the composite can interface with traditional electronics and dynamically respond to touch.

Furthermore, our composite can heal itself and detect damage in a whole new way. Damage creates new electrically conductive lines that activate shape-morphing in the material. The composite responds by spontaneously contracting when punctured.

In the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the shape-shifting android T-1000 can liquify; can change shape, color, and texture; is immune to mechanical damage; and displays superhuman strength. Such a complex robot requires complex multifunctional materials. Now, materials that can sense, process and respond to their environment like these shape-morphing composites are starting to become a reality.

But unlike T-1000 these new materials arent a force for evil theyre paving the way for soft assistive devices like prosthetics, companion robots, remote exploration technologies, antennas that can change shape and plenty more applications that engineers havent even dreamed up yet.

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Michael Ford, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Materials Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

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Soft Robots of the Future May Depend on New Materials that Conduct Electricity, Sense Damage and Self-Heal - The National Interest Online

LAS CRUCES, NM (KTSM) A Las Cruces robotics team has the chance to represent their city for the first time ever in regionals this December.

The team is made up of students from Arrowhead Park Early College High School Academy, a recognized Blue Ribbon School in the City of the Crosses.

Being on this robotics team gives these students leading capabilities, problem-solving skills, and the chance to work together as a team, said Arrowhead Robotics coach, Julie Wojtko.

Unfortunately, money plays a big factor if these students get to compete in Frisco, Texas, about 30 miles north of Dallas, Texas.

The team must raise about $14,000 by the end of November and for some students, its a big accomplishment to get to do so,No one really knows about this little town of Las Cruces in New Mexico and going to Dallas we get to show who we are, said Arrowhead Robotics member, Bianka Boudreaux.

The team is working hard to perfect their robot and get it at its best for regionals, We can get there and show them that were ready to compete, said Arrowhead Robotics member, Joseph Vreeland.

If any local business would like to partner with Arrowhead Robotics or give any amount of donation to get these students to regionals contact Julie Wojtko through email atJwojtko@lcps.netor through phone at (575) 527-9540.

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Funding needed to help Las Cruces robotics team get to regional competition - KTSM 9 News