Intel Offers Do-it-Yourself Robot Kits

Intel has announced plans to offer a kit that will let consumers make their own robots. The $1,600 package, which includes a motor and other parts, enables users to customize and print 3D components to create a small robot powered by the Intel Quark chip. Users can program these devices to complete tasks and can share their software with other robot owners via downloadable applications. Intel, which has begun courting do-it-yourself and hobbyist consumers, says it hopes the kit will cost less than $1,000 within five years. (PC World)(Reuters)(Intel)

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Dead Sparrow Turned into Robot to Study Bird Behavior

Researchers at Duke University recently took a major step toward better understanding how swamp sparrows use a combination of song and visual displays to communicate with one another. How they came about making this discovery, though, is what makes this story particularly newsworthy — they stuffed a deceased swamp sparrow with a miniature computer and some robotics to give it the ability to flap its wings as if it were alive.

Duke biologist Rindy Anderson led a team of biologists on the study, receiving technical assistance from engineering undergraduate student David Perch. The team brought “Robosparrow,” as it is aptly referred to, to a swamp sparrow breeding ground and placed it in the territories of live males.

Once all systems were go, the robotic bird “sang” swamp sparrow songs vis-à-vis a nearby sound system that let the birds know it was intruding on their ground. Anderson observed from a distance, sitting amid the tall swampy grasses, and changed the bird’s behavior to study various responses. They had it sing in a stationary position, shift side to side, and as mentioned before, flap its wings.

What they found was a song combined with wing waves is more potent than song alone, and that wing waves by themselves evoked the most aggressive response from live male birds.

“What I didn’t expect to see was that the birds would give strikingly similar aggressive wing-wave signals to the three types of invaders,” Anderson said. That is to say, she thought the defending birds would simply match the signals of the intruding robosparrow. What they instead discovered was that the males are more individualistic and consistent in the level of aggressiveness that they want to signal.

“That response makes sense, in retrospect, since attacks can be devastating,” she said. What Anderson means by this is that male swamp sparrows only want to signal a certain level of aggression to see if they can scare off an intruder without provoking any sort of physical conflict that could result in severe injury or death. Some sparrows were intimidated by robosparrow’s flapping, while others responded with a more aggressive flapping pattern.

Also worth noting from this study is that whether the robosparrow waved its wings or not, some live male sparrows still came in and attacked it. “It’s high stakes for these little birds. They only live a couple of years, and most only breed once a year, so owning a territory and having a female is high currency,” Anderson said.

Looking ahead, Anderson and her team plan to further test how the sparrows use wing waves combined with a characteristic twitter called “soft-song” to show aggression and fend off competition. Unfortunately, it’s going to take some time before the bot gets back in the field, as robosparrow’s motor is burned out from its last run, and the bird’s head was ripped off during one of the attacks.

 Source: duke.edu, electronicproducts.com

Reference:

Anderson, R., DuBois, A., Piech, D., Searcy, W., & Nowicki, S. (2013). Male response to an aggressive visual signal, the wing wave display, in swamp sparrows Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology DOI: 10.1007/s00265-013-1478-9

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Robot allows 'remote presence' in programming brain and spine stimulators

Jan. 16, 2013 — With the rapidly expanding use of brain and spinal cord stimulation therapy (neuromodulation), new "remote presence" technologies may help to meet the demand for experts to perform stimulator programming, reports a study in the January issue of Neurosurgery.

The preliminary study by Dr. Ivar Mendez of Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, supports the feasibility and safety of using a remote presence robot -- called the "RP-7" -- to increase access to specialists qualified to program the brain and spine stimulators used in neuromodulation.

Robot Lets Experts Guide Nurses in Programming Stimulators Dr. Mendez and his group developed the RP-7 as a way of allowing experts to "telementor" nonexpert nurses in programming stimulator devices. Already widely used for Parkinson's disease and severe chronic pain, neuromodulation is being explored for use in other conditions, such as epilepsy, severe depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In this form of therapy, a small electrode is surgically placed in a precise location in the brain or spine. A mild electrical current is delivered to stimulate that area, with the goal of interrupting abnormal activity. As more patients undergo brain and spine stimulation therapy, there's a growing demand for experts to program the stimulators that generate the electrical current.

The RP-7 is a mobile, battery-powered robot that can be controlled using a laptop computer. It is equipped with digital cameras and microphones, allowing the expert, nurse, and patient to communicate. The robot's "head" consists of a flat-screen monitor that displays the face of the expert operator.

The RP-7 also has an "arm" equipped with a touch-screen programmer, which the nurse can use to program the stimulator. The expert can "telestrate" to indicate to the nurse the correct buttons to push on the programming device.

Access to Specialists in the Next Room -- or Miles Away In the preliminary study, patients with neuromodulation devices were randomly assigned to conventional programming, with the expert in the room; or remote programming, with the expert using the RP-7 to guide a nurse in programming the stimulator. For the study, the expert operators were simply in another room of the same building. However, since the RP-7 operates over a conventional wireless connection, the expert can be anyplace that has Internet access.

On analysis of 20 patients (10 in each group), there was no significant difference in the accuracy or clinical outcomes of remote-presence versus conventional programming. No adverse events occurred with either type of session.

The remote-presence sessions took a little more time: 33 versus 26 minutes, on average. Patients, experts, and nonexpert nurses all gave high satisfaction scores for the programming experience.

"This study demonstrated that remote presence can be used for point-of-care programming of neuromodulation devices," Dr. Mendez and coauthors write. The study provides "proof of principle" that the RP-7 or similar devices can help to meet the need for experts needed to serve the rapidly expanding number of patients with neuromodulation therapies.

The researchers have also started a pilot study using a new mobile device, called the RP-Xpress. About the size of a small suitcase, the RP-Xpress is being used to perform long-distance home visits for patients living hundreds of miles away, using existing local cell phone networks. Dr. Mendez and colleagues conclude, "We envision a time, in the near future, when patients with implanted neuromodulation devices will have real-time access to an expert clinician from the comfort of their own home."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Wolters Kluwer Health: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, via Newswise.

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Journal Reference:

Ivar Mendez, Michael Song, Paula Chiasson, Luis Bustamante. Point-of-Care Programming for Neuromodulation. Neurosurgery, 2013; 72 (1): 99 DOI: 10.1227/NEU.0b013e318276b5b2

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Biology-friendly robot programming language: Training your robot the PaR-PaR way

Oct. 23, 2012 — Teaching a robot a new trick is a challenge. You can't reward it with treats and it doesn't respond to approval or disappointment in your voice. For researchers in the biological sciences, however, the future training of robots has been made much easier thanks to a new program called "PaR-PaR."

Nathan Hillson, a biochemist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), led the development of PaR-PaR, which stands for Programming a Robot. PaR-PaR is a simple high-level, biology-friendly, robot-programming language that allows researchers to make better use of liquid-handling robots and thereby make possible experiments that otherwise might not have been considered.

"The syntax and compiler for PaR-PaR are based on computer science principles and a deep understanding of biological workflows," Hillson says. "After minimal training, a biologist should be able to independently write complicated protocols for a robot within an hour. With the adoption of PaR-PaR as a standard cross-platform language, hand-written or software-generated robotic protocols could easily be shared across laboratories."

Hillson, who directs JBEI's Synthetic Biology program and also holds an appointment with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)'s Physical Biosciences Division, is the corresponding author of a paper describing PaR-PaR that appears in the American Chemical Society journal Synthetic Biology. The paper is titled "PaR-PaR Laboratory Automation Platform." Co-authors are Gregory Linshiz, Nina Stawski, Sean Poust, Changhao Bi and Jay Keasling.

Using robots to perform labor-intensive multi-step biological tasks, such as the construction and cloning of DNA molecules, can increase research productivity and lower costs by reducing experimental error rates and providing more reliable and reproducible experimental data. To date, however, automation companies have targeted the highly-repetitive industrial laboratory operations market while largely ignoring the development of flexible easy-to-use programming tools for dynamic non-repetitive research environments. As a consequence, researchers in the biological sciences have had to depend upon professional programmers or vendor-supplied graphical user interfaces with limited capabilities.

"Our vision was for a single protocol to be executable across different robotic platforms in different laboratories, just as a single computer software program is executable across multiple brands of computer hardware," Hillson says. "We also wanted robotics to be accessible to biologists, not just to robot specialist programmers, and for a laboratory that has a particular brand of robot to benefit from a wide variety of software and protocols."

Hillson, who earlier led the development of a unique software program called "j5" for identifying cost-effective DNA construction strategies, says that beyond enabling biologists to manually instruct robots in a time-effective manner, PaR-PaR can also amplify the utility of biological design automation software tools such as j5.

"Before PaR-PaR, j5 only outputted protocols for one single robot platform," Hillson says. "After PaR-PaR, the same protocol can now be executed on many different robot platforms."

The PaR-PaR language uses an object-oriented approach that represents physical laboratory objects -- including reagents, plastic consumables and laboratory devices -- as virtual objects. Each object has associated properties, such as a name and a physical location, and multiple objects can be grouped together to create a new composite object with its own properties.

Actions can be performed on objects and sequences of actions can be consolidated into procedures that in turn are issued as PaR-PaR commands. Collections of procedural definitions can be imported into PaR-PaR via external modules.

"A researcher, perhaps in conjunction with biological design automation software such as j5, composes a PaR-PaR script that is parsed and sent to a database," Hillson says. "The operational flow of the commands are optimized and adapted to the configuration of a specific robotic platform. Commands are then translated from the PaR-PaR meta-language into the robotic scripting language for execution."

Hillson and his colleagues have developed PaR-PaR as open-source software freely available through its web interface on the public PaR-PaR webserver http://parpar.jbei.org.

"Flexible and biology-friendly operation of robotic equipment is key to its successful integration in biological laboratories, and the efforts required to operate a robot must be much smaller than the alternative manual lab work," Hillson says. "PaR-PaR accomplishes all of these objectives and is intended to benefit a broad segment of the biological research community, including non-profits, government agencies and commercial companies."

This work was primarily supported by the DOE Office of Science.

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Journal Reference:

Gregory Linshiz, Nina Stawski, Sean Poust, Changhao Bi, Jay D. Keasling, Nathan J. Hillson. PaR-PaR Laboratory Automation Platform. ACS Synthetic Biology, 2012; : 121009112212000 DOI: 10.1021/sb300075t

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Robots using tools: Researchers aim to create 'MacGyver' robot

ScienceDaily (Oct. 9, 2012) — Robots are increasingly being used in place of humans to explore hazardous and difficult-to-access environments, but they aren't yet able to interact with their environments as well as humans. If today's most sophisticated robot was trapped in a burning room by a jammed door, it would probably not know how to locate and use objects in the room to climb over any debris, pry open the door, and escape the building.

A research team led by Professor Mike Stilman at the Georgia Institute of Technology hopes to change that by giving robots the ability to use objects in their environments to accomplish high-level tasks. The team recently received a three-year, $900,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research to work on this project.

"Our goal is to develop a robot that behaves like MacGyver, the television character from the 1980s who solved complex problems and escaped dangerous situations by using everyday objects and materials he found at hand," said Stilman, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. "We want to understand the basic cognitive processes that allow humans to take advantage of arbitrary objects in their environments as tools. We will achieve this by designing algorithms for robots that make tasks that are impossible for a robot alone possible for a robot with tools."

The research will build on Stilman's previous work on navigation among movable obstacles that enabled robots to autonomously recognize and move obstacles that were in the way of their getting from point A to point B.

"This project is challenging because there is a critical difference between moving objects out of the way and using objects to make a way," explained Stilman. "Researchers in the robot motion planning field have traditionally used computerized vision systems to locate objects in a cluttered environment to plan collision-free paths, but these systems have not provided any information about the objects' functions."

To create a robot capable of using objects in its environment to accomplish a task, Stilman plans to develop an algorithm that will allow a robot to identify an arbitrary object in a room, determine the object's potential function, and turn that object into a simple machine that can be used to complete an action. Actions could include using a chair to reach something high, bracing a ladder against a bookshelf, stacking boxes to climb over something, and building levers or bridges from random debris.

By providing the robot with basic knowledge of rigid body mechanics and simple machines, the robot should be able to autonomously determine the mechanical force properties of an object and construct motion plans for using the object to perform high-level tasks.

For example, exiting a burning room with a jammed door would require a robot to travel around any fire, use an object in the room to apply sufficient force to open the stuck door, and locate an object in the room that will support its weight while it moves to get out of the room.

Such skills could be extremely valuable in the future as robots work side-by-side with military personnel to accomplish challenging missions.

"The Navy prides itself on recruiting, training and deploying our country's most resourceful and intelligent men and women," said Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program in the Office of Naval Research (ONR). "Now that robotic systems are becoming more pervasive as teammates for warfighters in military operations, we must ensure that they are both intelligent and resourceful. Professor Stilman's work on the 'MacGyver-bot' is the first of its kind, and is already beginning to deliver on the promise of mechanical teammates able to creatively perform in high-stakes situations."

To address the complexity of the human-like reasoning required for this type of scenario, Stilman is collaborating with researchers Pat Langley and Dongkyu Choi. Langley is the director of the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise (ISLE), and is recognized as a co-founder of the field of machine learning, where he championed both experimental studies of learning algorithms and their application to real-world problems. Choi is an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Kansas.

Langley and Choi will expand the cognitive architecture they developed, called ICARUS, which provides an infrastructure for modeling various human capabilities like perception, inference, performance and learning in robots.

"We believe a hybrid reasoning system that embeds our physics-based algorithms within a cognitive architecture will create a more general, efficient and structured control system for our robot that will accrue more benefits than if we used one approach alone," said Stilman.

After the researchers develop and optimize the hybrid reasoning system using computer simulations, they plan to test the software using Golem Krang, a humanoid robot designed and built in Stilman's laboratory to study whole-body robotic planning and control.

This research is sponsored by the Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research, through grant number N00014-12-1-0143. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research.

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Robot reconnoiters uncharted terrain

ScienceDaily (Feb. 16, 2012) — Mobile robots have many uses. They serve as cleaners, carry out inspections and search for survivors of disasters. But often, there is no map to guide them through unknown territory. Researchers have now developed a mobile robot that can roam uncharted terrain and simultaneously map it -- all thanks to an algorithm toolbox.

Industrial robots have been a familiar sight in the workplace for many years. In automotive and household appliance manufacture, for example, they have proved highly reliable on production and assembly lines. But now a new generation of high-tech helpers is at hand: Mobile robots are being used in place of humans to explore hazardous and difficult-to-access environments such as buildings in danger of collapsing, caves, or ground that has been polluted by an industrial accident. Equipped with sensors and optical cameras, these robots can help rescue services search for victims in the wake of natural disasters, explosions or fires, and can measure concentrations of hazardous substances.

There's just one problem: Often there is no map to show them the location of obstacles and steer them along navigable routes. Yet such maps are critical to ensuring that the high-tech machines are able to make progress, either independently or guided by remote control. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB in Karlsruhe have now developed a roaming land robot that autonomously reconnoiters and maps uncharted terrain. The robot uses special algorithms and multi-sensor data to carve a path through unknown territory.

"To be able to navigate independently, our mobile robot has to fulfill a number of requirements. It must be able to localize itself within its immediate surroundings, continuously recalculate its position as it makes its way through the danger area, and simultaneously refine the map it is generating," says graduate engineer Christian Frey of the IOSB. To make this possible, he and his team have developed an algorithm toolbox for the robot that runs on a built-in computer. The robot is additionally equipped with a variety of sensors. Odometry sensors measure wheel revolutions, inertial sensors compute accelerations, and distance-measuring sensors register clearance from walls, steps, trees and bushes, to name but a few potential obstacles. Cameras and laser scanners record the environment and assist in the mapping process. The algorithms read the various data supplied by the sensors and use them to determine the robot's precise location. The interplay of all these different elements concurrently produces a map, which is updated continuously. Experts call the process Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, or SLAM.

Mobile robots face an additional challenge: to find the optimal path that will enable them to complete each individual task. Depending on the situation, this may be the shortest and quickest route, or perhaps the most energy-efficient, i.e. the one that uses the least amount of gasoline. When planning a course, the high-tech helpers must take into account restrictions on mobility such as a limited turning circle, and must navigate around obstacles. And should the environment change, for example as a result of falling objects or earthquake aftershocks, a robot must register this and use its toolbox to recalculate its route.

"We made our toolbox modular, so it's not difficult to adapt the algorithms to suit different types of mobile robot or specific in- or outdoor application scenarios. For example, it doesn't matter what sensor set-up is used, or whether the robot has two- or four-wheel drive," says Frey. The software can be customized to meet the needs of individual users, with development work taking just a few months. Frey adds: "The toolbox is suitable for all sorts of situations, not only accident response scenarios. It can be installed in cleaning robots or lawnmowers, for example, and a further possible application would be in roaming robots used to patrol buildings or inspect gas pipelines for weak points." From March 6-10, the IOSB researchers will be demonstrating their mobile robot technology at the CeBIT trade fair.

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