INVITE Science Talk 2023 - Robotics
Online-Event | The Topic of this years Science talk was "Mobile robots & Teleoperation: Perfect combination of human intelligence and automation"
Accelerate Utilization of Modern Robotics within our industry.
Within the Robotics Talks by INVITE in 2023, leading technology providers worldwide presented the state of the art and their visions. INVITE was delighted to welcome BostonDynamics and SRI International as first guests on the 10th of March 4pm (CET) in the online session.
These events are aimed at users with an interest in innovative automation in manufacturing, process industries, plants, labs, inspection, .....
Imagine... you have mobile robots that support standard tasks in your work area... but that you can also use at any time for any task without having to go on-site... inspecting sites, buildings or plants, taking samples, opening cabinets or doors, identifying hazardous material and then disposing of it autonomously, moving material in the lab or operating lab equipment if no one is on-site, changing filters in production, ...
Suddenly automation becomes easy and cheap. You have the choice to automate 80% autonomously requiring 20% of the effort of full automation only. Machines just ask the human for remote help if they get stuck.
- The perfect combination of human intelligence and competence with physical presence of the machine on-site.
How realistic is this?
Mobile robots with robotic arms are being used in increasing numbers in laboratories, as well as in factories, warehouses, and open spaces. Teleoperation has been used in surgery, but also in disaster protection for decades. In the last few years, both technologies have rapidly developed and converged. There is practically no provider of mobile robotics that is not engaged in teleoperation – anyhow mobile teleoperation is currently mostly limited to navigation and moving around within existing applications.
Two-Arm Robot at INVITE opening a bag teleoperated by human intelligence ©INVITE
Contributors
Boston Dynamics is proud to participate in the Science Talks by INVITE.
We believe in changing your ideas of what mobile robots can do as we imagine and create exceptional products that provide transformational value to your businesses.
That starts with teleoperation. We want our robots to be easy to use, so our interfaces for local and remote control via our hand-held tablet and our PC-based Scout system are designed to be intuitive enough to allow a first-time user to walk Spot around a plant and use its Arm within minutes with no instruction. But robots need to do real work, so our interfaces are powerful enough to expose all of the functionality of our leading mobile robotics systems for inspection and manipulation tasks.
Right now, Spot can go almost anywhere a person can go in an industrial facility and provide actionable insights through automated inspections. Spot Arm is being used for emergency response around the world. Innovative partners and customers are using our APIs to build new automated solutions on top of our Spot platform. Stretch is unloading containers at distribution centers. And we are continually updating our product line with new features and new capabilities.
In the near future, agile mobile robots are going to be everywhere in industrial facilities from food and beverage plants to refineries, reducing maintenance costs through automated condition monitoring of site equipment and enabling personnel to focus on higher value-added tasks. These robots are also going to be teleporting subject matter experts onto your sites from around the world, allowing them to diagnose problems and interact remotely. Building the organizational capacity to incorporate these transformational tools into your operations will take time. Let’s start now.
Jake Coleman, the manipulation product manager for Spot, provided an overview of the current state-of-the art in teleoperation at Boston Dynamics (with a demonstration of Spot through Scout) and provided insight into the philosophy that is guiding our development of agile mobile robotics.
SRI, founded as Stanford Research Institute, has been creating telemanipulation solutions for decades. The team created and launched the Da Vinci Surgical System, the leading robotic surgery system, where surgeons perform surgery via telemanipulation. The team also created Taurus a small robot system used for bomb disposal featured in Wired Magazine.
SRI’s Robotics team is focused on telemanipulation in the pharmaceutical industry. In today’s highly complex pharmaceutical manufacturing environments, minimizing human interaction with manufacturing is now a critical priority. SRI’s robot telemanipulation software solution integrates with third-party robot arms designed for the pharmaceutical industry, allowing for telemanipulated operations, including repair and maintenance in sterile pharmaceutical manufacturing areas, such as isolators and clean rooms. As part of this, SRI has launched XRGo, SRI’s telemanipulation software designed for integration with third-party robot arms intended for the pharmaceutical industry
Here are some videos that demonstrate some of the work SRI has done.
- Pharma Overview - https://youtu.be/YWFOTaYjA8k
- Industrial Robot Arm Integration - https://youtu.be/PRcAMLEzhuk
Alexander Kernbaum has been with SRI International’s Robotics team for 10 year and is the Interim Director of Robotics. He has a PhD in biologically inspired Robotics / Mechanical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University. His passion is creating novel hardware innovations that solve big problems while creating compelling value in the market.
He is the inventor of several novel actuator technologies which have been licensed to major manufacturers or spun out to create new venture-backed companies. For these efforts Alexander was awarded the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in 2018.
As a principal investigator at SRI, Alexander has led efforts on a wide range of topics including personal mobility platforms, human power augmentation, efficient drive trains, human-safe robotic actuation, under-actuated systems, soft robotics, search and rescue robots, and biologically inspired control architectures.
SRI’s Robotics team has enabled first-of-a-kind innovations in robotics including:
- Yamaha’s Motobot- An autonomous robot motorcycle driver
- Da Vinci SurgicalSystem – The leading robotic surgical system for minimally invasive telerobotic surgery
- Industrial Robotic Telemanipulation used for Bomb Disposal and by several energy corporations.
