RobotsPodcast

In this episode, Abate flew to Denver, Colorado, to get a behind-the-scenes look at the future of recycling with Joe Castagneri, the head of AI at Amp Robotics. With Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) processing a staggering 25 tons of trash per hour, robotic sorting is the clear long-term solution. Recycling is a for-profit industry. When the margins don't make sense, the items will not be recycled. This is why Amp's mission to use robotics and AI to bring down the cost of recycling and increase the number of items that can be sorted for recycling is so impactful.

Nico, Emil, and Moritz founded ReRun with the mission of making powerful visualization tools free and easily accessible for roboticists. Nico and Emil talk about how these powerful tools help debug the complex problem scopes faced by roboticists.

Conventional sheet metal manufacturing is highly inefficient for the low-volume production seen in the space industry. At Machina Labs, they developed a novel method of forming sheet metal using two robotic arms to bend the metal into different geometries. This method cuts down the time to produce large sheet metal parts from several months down to a few hours. Ed Mehr, Co-Founder and CEO of Machina Labs, explains this revolutionary manufacturing process.

Many people associate prosthetic limbs with nude-colored imitations of human limbs. Something built to blend into a society where people have all of their limbs while serving functional use cases. On the other end of the spectrum are the highly optimized prosthetics used by Athletes, built for speed, low weight, and appearing nothing like a human limb. As a child under 12 years old, neither of these categories of prosthetics particularly speaks to you. Open Bionics, founded by Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne was started to create a third category of prosthetics. One that targets the fun, imaginative side of children, while still providing the daily functional requirements. Through partnerships with Disney and Lucasfilms, Open Bionics has built an array of imagination-capturing prosthetic limbs that are straight-up cool. Joel Gibbard dives deep in this episode into why they founded Open Bionics, and why you should invest in their company as they are getting ready to let the general public invest in them for the first time.

Dr. Tyler Reid, co-founder and CTO of Xona Space Systems, discusses a new type of global navigation satellite system (GNSS). Xona Space Systems plans to provide centimeter-level positioning accuracy and will serve the emerging autonomous vehicle community, where precise navigation is key. Reid discusses the advantages and technical challenges of a low Earth orbit (LEO) solution.

The Recycling Industry in the United States is a for-profit industry. They profit from taking recyclable material, refining it, and reselling it to companies at a cheaper price than producing the material from scratch. If you look at the demand side of the recycling industry, an array of multi-billion dollar companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are incentivized to buy recycled goods and reduce their materials costs. If you look at the supply side, ~300 million tons of trash are generated annually in the United States. Estimates suggest that up to 75% of that is recyclable. On paper, it seems clear that maximizing the amount of trash the US recycles is in everyone's interest. One issue though, less than a third of the trash ends up recycled. Areeb, co-founder of Glacier, breaks down the multi-layered reasoning behind why the Recycling industry is unable to handle this volume of trash, and what Glacier is doing to address this.

Deep Learning Indaba is an organization based in South Africa that is dedicated to strengthening communities in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning across the continent of Africa. Tune in for a Spotlight on Benjamin Rosman from ICRA 2022 on the initiatives of Deep Learning Indaba. What does Indaba mean? An indaba is a Zulu word for a gathering or meeting. Such meetings are held throughout southern Africa, and serve several functions: to listen and share news of members of the community, to discuss common interests and issues facing the community, and to give advice and coach others.

Prof Brendan Englot, from Stevens Institute of Technology, discusses the challenges in perception and decision-making for underwater robots – especially in the field. He discusses ongoing research using the BlueROV platform and autonomous driving simulators.

A lot of times on our podcast we dive into startups and smaller companies in robotics. Today’s talk is unique in that Brady Watkins gives us insight into how a big company like Softbank Robotics looks into the Robotics market. "we think scale first, (the) difference from a startup is our goal isn't to think what's the first 10 to 20, but we need to think what's the first 20,000 look like." - Brady Watkins

Brandon Gilles, Founder and CEO of Luxonis, tells us his story about how Luxonis designed one of the most versatile perception platforms on the market. Brandon took the lessons learned from his time at Ubiquiti, which transformed networking with network-on-a-chip architectures, and applied the mastery of embedded hardware and software to the OAK-D camera and the broader OAK line of products. To refer to the OAK-D as a stereovision camera tells only part of the story. Aside from depth sensing, the OAK-D leverages the Intel Myriad X to perform perception computations directly on the camera in a highly power-efficient architecture. Customers can also instantly leverage a wide array of open-source computer vision and AI packages that are pre-calibrated to the optics system. Additionally, by leveraging a system-on-a-module design, the Luxonis team easily churns out a multitude of variations of the hardware platform to fit the wide variety of customer use cases. Tune in for more.

Dr. Sihao Sun discusses his award-winning research in the area of controlling the flight of a drone when faced with a sudden rotor failure.

Dr. Sihao Sun discusses his award-winning research in the area of controlling the flight of a drone when faced with a sudden rotor failure.

Underwater Autonomous Vehicles face challenging environments where GPS Navigation is rarely possible. John McConnell discusses his research, presented at ICRA 2022, into fusing overhead imagery with traditional SLAM algorithms. This research results in a more robust localization and mapping, with reduced drift commonly seen in SLAM algorithms. Satellite imagery can be obtained for free or low cost through Google or Mapbox, creating an easily deployable framework for companies in industry to implement.

Sebastian Scherer from CMU's Airlab gives us a behind-the-scenes demo at ICRA of their Autonomous Flight Control AI. Their approach aims to cooperate with human pilots and act the way they would. They took this approach to create a more natural, less intrusive process for co-habiting human and AI pilots at a single airport. They describe it as a Turing Test, where ideally the human pilot will be unable to distinguish an AI from a person operating the plane. Their communication system works parallel with a 6-camera hardware package based on the Nvidia AGX Dev Kit. This kit measures the angular speed of objects flying across the videos. In this world, high angular velocity means low risk -- since the object is flying at a fast speed perpendicular to the camera plane. Low angular velocity indicates high risk since the object could be flying directly at the plane, headed for a collision.

Yu Sun, previous chair of the Robotics Grasping and Manipulation Competition, speaks on the value that this competition brought to the robotics community.

Bill Smart, one fo the early ICRA Competition Chairs, dives into the high-level decisions involved with creating a meaningful competition.

At ICRA 2022, Competitions are a core part of the conference. We shine a spotlight on influential competitions in Robotics. In this episode, Dr Liam Paull talks about the Duckietown Competition, where robots drive around Rubber Ducky passengers in an autonomous driving track.

Dr. Carolyn Matl, Research Scientist at Toyota Research Institute, explains why Interactive Perception and soft tactile sensors are critical for manipulating challenging objects such as liquids, grains, and dough.

ApexAI is driving advances in ROS2 to make it viable for use in autonomous vehicles. The changes they are implementing are bridging the gap between the automotive world and robotics. Joe Speed, VP of Product at ApexAI, dives into the current multi-year development process of bringing a car to market, and how ApexAI will transform this process into the shorter development time we see with modern technology. This technology was showcased at the Indy Autonomous Challenge where million-dollar autonomous cars raced each other on a track. Apex.OS is a certified software framework and SDK for autonomous systems that enable software developers to write safe and certified autonomous driving applications compatible with ROS 2.

Machine Learning at the edge is gaining steam. BrainChip is accelerating this with their Akida architecture, which is mimicking the human brain by incorporating the 5 human senses on a machine learning-enabled chip. Their chips will let roboticists and IoT developers run ML on device for low latency, low power, and low-cost machine learning-enabled products. This opens up a new product category where everyday devices can affordably become smart devices.

Over the past decade, camera technology has made gradual, and significant improvements thanks to the mobile phone industry. This has accelerated multiple industries, including Robotics. Today, Davide Scaramuzza discusses a step-change in camera innovation that has the potential to dramatically accelerate vision-based robotics applications. Davide Scaramuzza deep dives on Event Cameras, which operate fundamentally different from traditional cameras. Instead of sampling every pixel on an imaging sensor at a fixed frequency, the "pixels" on an event camera all operate independently, and each responds to changes in illumination. This technology unlocks a multitude of benefits, including extremely highspeed imaging, removal of the concept of "framerate", removal of data corruption due to having the sun in the sensor, reduced data throughput, and low power consumption. Tune in for more.

In this episode, we hear from Suma Reddy, CEO of Future Acres, a company focused on creating smart farming tools to reduce labor demand and increase efficiency. Suma introduces her journey into agriculture technology and the issues in current farming practices that can benefit from robotic solutions. Future Acres’s robotic harvest companion, Carry, autonomously transports crops within the farms and collects valuable data. Suma also discusses the impact of their technology so far as well as visions for the future of agricultural technology.

Oleg Shipitko, Chief Technical Director of Evocargo, an integrated logistics service company using autonomous vehicles speaks with Kate. Oleg talks about the need for automating operational logistics inside enclosed facilities centers and how their autonomous vehicles and other operational services can greatly improve the current way we transport goods within facilities such as ports, warehouses and factories. Oleg also discusses the sensing choices for the specific use cases of these autonomous vehicles.

Jakob Foerster an accredited Machine Learning Research Scientist who has been at the forefront of research on Multi-Agent Learning speaks with interviewer Kegan Strawn. Dr. Foerster explains why incorporating uncertainty into multi-agent interactions is essential to creating robust algorithms that can operate not only in games but in real-world applications.

Torrey Smith, Co-Founder of Endiatx, is changing the reputation endoscopies have for being uncomfortable. At Endiatx, they are developing a pill-sized robot that you swallow, which will then livestream your digestive system for a doctor to view. Our interviewer Abate dives in.

Schneider, PhD Candidate at Stanford, explains her work on Reachbot, a long-reach crawling and anchoring robot repurposes extendable booms for mobile manipulation in Outer Space. They discuss the challenges and exciting elements of robotic prototyping for low-gravity or otherwise unique environments.

Kate speaks with Brad Bogolea, CEO and Co-founder of Simbe Robotics. Simbe Robotics developed a mobile robot named Tally, which is improving the efficiency of retail stores. Tally uses Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence to autonomously navigate aisles, know when to restock shelves, and recognize when products are priced incorrectly.

Amit Goel, Director of Product Management for Autonomous Machines at NVIDIA, discusses the new collaboration between Open Robotics and NVIDIA. The collaboration will improve the way ROS and NVIDIA's line of products such as Isaac SIM and the Jetson line of embedded boards operate together. NVIDIA's Isaac SIM lets developers build robust and scalable simulations. Dramatically reducing the costs of capturing real-world data and speeding up development time. Their Jetson line of embedded boards is core to many robotics architectures, leveraging hardware-optimized chips for machine learning, computer vision, video processing, and more. The improvements to ROS will allow robotics companies to better utilize the available computational power, while still developing on the robotics-centric platform familiar to many.

Lilly speaks to Alex Wallar, co-founder and CTO of The Routing Company. Wallar shares his background in multi-robot path-planning and optimization, and his research on scheduling and routing algorithms for high-capacity ride-sharing. They discuss how The Routing Company helps cities meet the needs of their people, the technical ins and outs of their dispatcher and assignment system, and the importance of public transit to cities and their economics.

Lilly interviews Chris Lee, a graduate student at Oregon State University. Lee explains his research on marsupial robots, or carrier-passenger pairs of heterogeneous robot systems. They discuss the possible applications of marsupial robots including the DARPA Subterranean Competition, and some of the technical challenges including optimal deployment formulated as a stochastic assignment problem.

Anthony DiMare and Charles Chiau deep dive into how Bedrock Ocean is innovating in the world of Marine Surveys. At Bedrock Ocean, they are developing an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that is able to map the seafloor autonomously and at a high resolution. They are also developing a data platform to access, process, and visualize data captured from other companies at the seafloor. Bedrock Ocean is solving two problems in the industry of Marine Surveying. 1. The vast majority of the seafloor is completely unmapped 2. The data that is captured from the seafloor is not standardized or centralized. Seafloor data conducted by two different companies with the same or different hardware to capture the data can vary significantly in the calculated seafloor profile

Shihan Lu interviews Travis Schneider, Business Development Manager at RE2 Robotics, focusing on their work on mobile outdoor manipulation. Travis introduces several robotic products and services of RE2, including RE2 Sapien robotic arms and human-centered system integration, and how they can be used to help rather than replace workers. He also shares his thoughts about challenges in human-robot collaboration.

Abate talks to Maxime Gariel, CTO of Xwing about the autonomous flight technology they are developing. At Xwing, they retrofit traditional aircraft to include multiple sensors such as cameras, lidar, and radar. Using sensor fusion algorithms, they create an exceptionally accurate model of the environment. This model of the environment and advanced path planning and control algorithms allow the plane to autonomously navigate in the airport, take off, fly to a destination, and land, all without a person on board.

Intel RealSense is known in the robotics community for its plug-and-play stereo cameras. These cameras make gathering 3D depth data a seamless process, with easy integrations into ROS to simplify the software development for your robots. From the RealSense team, Joel Hagberg talks about how they built this product, which allows roboticists to perform computer vision and machine learning at the edge.

Matt Bilsky, founder and CEO of FLX Solutions, discusses the snake-like robot he invented called the FLX BOT. The FLX BOT consists of modular links, each with a joint that can extend and rotate to get into tight spaces. Each link includes sensors including inertial measurement units and a camera. The robot is used to navigate and work in challenging environments, such as above ceilings and within walls. Matt discusses the key innovations of his product as well as his academic and entrepreneurial journey that led him to the FLX BOT.

Lilly interviews Giovanni Beltrame, Professor of Computer and Software Engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal where he directs the Making Innovative Space Technology (MIST) lab. Beltrame highlights the technical challenges of exploring another planet with a swarm of robots controlled by an astronaut operator. They discuss minimizing cognitive load for the operator, analog missions to volcanic lava tubes on Earth, and spherical hopping robots for the moon.

Lilly interviews Amanda Prorok, Professor of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. Prorok discusses her research on multi-robot and multi-agent systems and learning coordination policies via Graph Neural Networks. They dig into her recent work on self-interested robots and finding explainability in emergent behavior. Amanda Prorok is an Assistant Professor (University Lecturer) in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. She serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (R-AL) and Associate Editor for Autonomous Robots (AURO). Prior to joining Cambridge, Prorok was a postdoctoral researcher at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, where she worked with Prof. Vijay Kumar. She completed her PhD at EPFL, Switzerland, with Prof. Alcherio Martinoli.

Abate interviews Tessa Lau on her startup Dusty Robotics which is innovating in the field of construction. At Dusty Robotics, they developed a robot to automate the laying of floor plans on the floors in construction sites. Typically, this is done manually using a tape measure and reading printed-out plans. This difficult task can often take a team of two a week to complete. Time-consuming tasks like this are incredibly expensive on a construction site where multiple different teams are waiting on this task to complete. Any errors in this process are even more time-consuming to fix. By using a robot to automatically convert 3d models of building plans into markings on the floors, the amount of time and errors are dramatically reduced. Dr. Tessa Lau is an experienced entrepreneur with expertise in AI, machine learning, and robotics. She is currently Founder/CEO at Dusty Robotics, a construction robotics company building robot-powered tools for the modern construction workforce. Prior to Dusty, she was CTO/co-founder at Savioke, where she orchestrated the deployment of 75+ delivery robots into hotels and high-rises. Previously, Dr. Lau was a Research Scientist at Willow Garage, where she developed simple interfaces for personal robots. She also spent 11 years at IBM Research working in business process automation and knowledge capture. More generally, Dr. Lau is interested in technology that gives people super-powers, and building businesses that bring that technology into people’s lives. Dr. Lau was recognized as one of the Top 5 Innovative Women to Watch in Robotics by Inc. in 2018 and one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in 2015. Dr. Lau holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

Lilly interviews Afshin Doust, CEO of Advanced Intelligent Systems. Doust explains the company’s modular, robots-as-a-service subscription business model. They discuss robotic solutions for the agricultural industry, disinfecting robots to combat COVID19, and other exciting new developments at AIS.

Kate speaks with Anni Kern, Head of Communication, strategy, and teams at Cybathlon for over four years. She describes the motivation and concepts for the Cybathlon organizations to develop a common platform to remove barriers between people with disabilities, technology developers, and the public. Anni also describes the specifics of  Cybathlon competitions and the organization and planning.

Lilly interviews Bernhard Thomaszewski, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montréal and research scientist at ETH Zurich. Thomaszewski discusses his background in animation at Disney, his current work on mechanical metamaterials and digital fabrication, and how physics-based modeling has connected the dots.

Pietro Filardo discusses a swarm approach to deep sea mining with a minimally adverse effect on the environment.

Abate interviews Benjamin “Pietro” Filardo, CEO and founder of Pliant Energy Systems. At PES, they developed a novel form of actuation using two undulating fins on a robot. These fins present multiple benefits over traditional propeller systems including excellent energy efficiency, low water turbulence, and an ability to maneuver in water, land, and ice. Aside from its benefits on a robot, Pietro also talks about its advantages for harnessing energy from moving water.

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