U.S. Commercial Drone Delivery Comes Closer

Posted on April 17, 2024 by Lionel S.

Stephen Cass: Hello and welcome to Fixing the Future, an IEEE Spectrum podcast where we look at concrete solutions to tough problems. I’m your host, Stephen Cass, a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. And before I start, I just want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage of some of Spectrum’s most important beats, including AI, climate change, and robotics, by signing up for one of our free newsletters. Just go to spectrum.ieee.org/newsletters to subscribe. We’ve been covering the drone delivery company Zipline in Spectrum for several years, and I do encourage listeners to check out our great onsite reporting from Rwanda in 2019 when we visited one of Zipline’s dispatch centers for delivering vital medical supplies into rural areas. But now it’s 2024, and Zipline is expanding into commercial drone delivery in the United States, including into urban areas, and hitting some recent milestones. Here to Continue reading U.S. Commercial Drone Delivery Comes Closer→

Video Friday: Robot Dog Can’t Fall

Posted on April 12, 2024 by Lionel S.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboCup German Open: 17–21 April 2024, KASSEL, GERMANY AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2024: 22–25 April 2024, SAN DIEGO Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH Enjoy today’s videos! I think suggesting that robots can’t fall is much less useful than instead suggesting that robots can fall and get quickly and easily get back up again. [ Deep Robotics ] Sanctuary AI says that this video shows Phoenix operating at “human-equivalent speed,” but they don’t specify which human or under which conditions. Though it’s faster than I would be, that’s for Continue reading Video Friday: Robot Dog Can’t Fall→

Ukraine Is the First “Hackers’ War”

Posted on April 10, 2024 by Lionel S.

Rapid and resourceful technological improvisation has long been a mainstay of warfare, but the war in Ukraine is taking it to a new level. This improvisation is most conspicuous in the ceaselessly evolving struggle between weaponized drones and electronic warfare, a cornerstone of this war. Weaponized civilian first-person-view (FPV) drones began dramatically reshaping the landscape of the war in the summer of 2023. Prior to this revolution, various commercial drones played critical roles, primarily for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Since 2014, the main means of defending against these drones has been electronic warfare (EW), in its many forms. The iterative, lethal dance between drones and EW has unfolded a rich technological tapestry, revealing insights into a likely future of warfare where EW and drones intertwine. After the invasion of Crimea, in 2014, Ukrainian forces depended heavily on commercial off-the-shelf drones, such as models from DJI, for reconnaissance and surveillance. These Continue reading Ukraine Is the First “Hackers’ War”→

Video Friday: Co-Expression

Posted on March 29, 2024 by Lionel S.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboCup German Open: 17–21 April 2024, KASSEL, GERMANY AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2024: 22–25 April 2024, SAN DIEGO, CA Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Enjoy today’s videos! Columbia engineers build Emo, a silicon-clad robotic face that makes eye contact and uses two AI models to anticipate and replicate a person’s smile before the person actually smiles—a major advance in robots predicting human facial expressions accurately, improving interactions, and building trust between humans and robots. [ Columbia ] Researchers at Stanford University have invented a way to augment electric motors to make them much more Continue reading Video Friday: Co-Expression→

Video Friday: Project GR00T

Posted on March 22, 2024 by Lionel S.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Enjoy today’s videos! See NVIDIA’s journey from pioneering advanced autonomous vehicle hardware and simulation tools to accelerated perception and manipulation for autonomous mobile robots and industrial arms, culminating in the next wave of cutting-edge AI for humanoid robots. [ NVIDIA ] In release 4.0, we advanced Spot’s locomotion abilities thanks to the power of reinforcement learning. Paul Domanico, Robotics Engineer at Boston Dynamics talks through how Spot’s hybrid approach of combining reinforcement learning with model predictive control creates an even more stable robot in the most antagonistic Continue reading Video Friday: Project GR00T→

How Zipline Designed Its Droid Delivery System

Posted on March 15, 2024 by Lionel S.

About a year ago, Zipline introduced Platform 2, an approach to precision urban drone delivery that combines a large hovering drone with a smaller package-delivery “Droid.” Lowered on a tether from the belly of its parent Zip drone, the Droid contains thrusters and sensors (plus a 2.5- to 3.5-kilogram payload) to reliably navigate itself to a delivery area of just one meter in diameter. The Zip, meanwhile, safely remains hundreds of meters up. After depositing its payload, the Droid rises back up to the drone on its tether, and off they go. At first glance, the sensor and thruster-packed Droid seems complicated enough to be bordering on impractical, especially when you consider the relative simplicity of other drone delivery solutions, which commonly just drop the package itself on a tether from a hovering drone. I’ve been writing about robots long enough that I’m suspicious of robotic solutions that appear to Continue reading How Zipline Designed Its Droid Delivery System→

Video Friday: Human to Humanoid

Posted on March 8, 2024 by Lionel S.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. HRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER, COLO. Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Enjoy today’s videos! We present Human to Humanoid (H2O), a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework that enables real-time, whole-body teleoperation of a full-sized humanoid robot with only an RGB camera. We successfully achieve teleoperation of dynamic, whole-body motions in real-world scenarios, including walking, back jumping, kicking, turning, waving, pushing, boxing, etc. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration to achieve learning-based, real-time, whole-body humanoid teleoperation. [ CMU ] Legged robots have the potential to traverse complex Continue reading Video Friday: Human to Humanoid→

Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds

Posted on February 8, 2024 by Lionel S.

It’s kind of astonishing how quadrotors have scaled over the past decade. Like, we’re now at the point where they’re verging on disposable, at least from a commercial or research perspective—for a bit over US $200, you can buy a little 27-gram, completely open-source drone, and all you have to do is teach it to fly. That’s where things do get a bit more challenging, though, because teaching drones to fly is not a straightforward process. Thanks to good simulation and techniques like reinforcement learning, it’s much easier to imbue drones with autonomy than it used to be. But it’s not typically a fast process, and it can be finicky to make a smooth transition from simulation to reality. New York University’s Agile Robotics and Perception Lab has managed to streamline the process of getting basic autonomy to work on drones, and streamline it by a lot: The lab’s system Continue reading Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds→

Drones Deliver Defibrillators Faster Than Ambulances

Posted on December 7, 2023 by Lionel S.

Every minute counts when someone suffers a cardiac arrest. New research suggests that drones equipped with equipment to automatically restart someone’s heart could help get life-saving care to people much faster. If your heart stops beating outside of a hospital, your chance of survival is typically less than 10 percent. One thing that can boost the prospect of pulling through is an automated external defibrillator (AED)—a device that can automatically diagnose dangerous heart rhythms and deliver an electric shock to get the heart pumping properly again. AEDs are designed to be easy to use and provide step-by-step voice instructions, making it possible for untrained bystanders to deliver treatment before an ambulance arrives. But even though AEDs are often installed in public spaces such as shopping malls and airports, the majority of cardiac arrests outside of hospitals actually occur in homes. A team of Swedish researchers decided to use drones to Continue reading Drones Deliver Defibrillators Faster Than Ambulances→

Category Archives: Drones