Shape of things to comeIEEE ICRA 2009 showcased advances in robotics

The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2009) was held in Kobe, Japan, last week. It is the world’s premier robotics event, with researchers and engineers from around the world gathering to discuss the latest advances in the field. Technology Review’s Kristina Grifantini noted these intriguing innovations:

• Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania presented the latest version of RiSE, a four-legged robot that can both scamper along the ground and rapidly climb a tree or a pole. RiSE V3 was designed and built at Boston Dynamics, a company which also built the four-legged military robot BigDog (see 28 March 2008 HS Daily Wire; Boston Dynamics has also received a contract from DARPA to develop a hopping robot; see 8 May 2009 HS Daily Wire). Daniel Koditschek, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania,says that RISE V3 (watch a video) could “play an invaluable role in search and rescue, reconnaissance, surveillance, or inspection applications.”
• University of Minnesota researchers showed their own mobile robot, called Adelopod. Adelopod does not use legs or even wheels to get around. Instead, it turns itself over and over using a pair of 12-centimeter arms (watch a video). “Given its size, it can go places that other robots cannot,” says Nikos Papanikolopoulos, director of the university’s Center for Distributed Robotics. The group has also developed the larger Loper robot, which can carry several Adelopods and scatter them throughout an area.
• Researchers at the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, demonstrated a robot that can find its way around a city without GPS or preloaded maps. Instead, it asks pedestrians for directions and uses gesture tracking and voice recognition to interpret commands. It also uses human tracking, obstacle detection, and map building to guide itself around a busy city (watch video at TUM’s Web site).
• Boston University researchers offer a different approach to having robots navigate around busy city streets. The researchers’ Robotic Urban-Like Environment (RULE) system lets the cars understand a simple, high-level command by a human, such as “Take me to the grocery store” ((watch a video). Grifantini writes that the demonstrations show that the robotic cars can not only reach their destination safely, but can also move into the correct lane, stop at red lights, and even park on their own.
• Researchers at ETH Zurich and others demonstrated system that can spot, and respond to, unexpected dangers. The system can quickly identify pedestrians and other obstacles and predict their paths in order to avoid them (watch a video).

Grifantini correctly points out that no robotics conference would be complete without a few oddball robots and machines, and ICRA was no exception. There was a robot that mimics how a human spins pizza, and another that picks up empty coffee cups from around an office. Researchers at McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, showed a robot that can create ice sculptures on its own (watch a video).