RobotsPodcast

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.