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    4Nov, 2023
    Robot stand-in mimics movements in VR

    Researchers from Cornell and Brown University have developed a souped-up telepresence robot that responds automatically and in real-time to a remote user’s movements and gestures made in virtual reality.

    The robotic system, called VRoxy, allows a remote user in a small space, like an office, to collaborate via VR with teammates in a much larger space. VRoxy represents the latest in remote, robotic embodiment.

    Donning a VR headset, a user has access to two view modes: Live mode shows an immersive image of the collaborative space in real time for interactions with local collaborators, while navigational mode displays rendered pathways of the room, allowing remote users to “teleport” to where they’d like to go. This navigation mode allows for quicker, smoother mobility for the remote user and limits motion sickness.

    The system’s automatic nature lets remote teammates focus solely on collaboration rather than on manually steering the robot, researchers said.

    “The great benefit of virtual reality is we can leverage all kinds of locomotion techniques that people use in virtual reality games, like instantly moving from one position to another,” said Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student in the field of information science at Cornell. “This functionality enables remote users to physically occupy a very limited amount of space but collaborate with teammates in a much larger remote environment.”

    Sakashita is the lead author of “VRoxy: Wide-Area Collaboration From an Office Using a VR-Driven Robotic Proxy,” to be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), held Oct. 29 through Nov. 1.

    VRoxy’s automatic, real-time responsiveness is key for both remote and local teammates, researchers said. With a robot proxy like VRoxy, a remote teammate confined to a small office can interact in a group activity held in a much larger space, like in a design collaboration scenario.

    For teammates, the VRoxy robot automatically mimics the user’s body position and other vital nonverbal cues that are otherwise lost with telepresence robots and on Zoom. For instance, VRoxy’s monitor — which displays a rendering of the user’s face — will tilt accordingly depending on the user’s focus.

    It is equipped with a 360-degree camera, a monitor that displays facial expressions captured by the user’s VR headset, a robotic pointer finger and omnidirectional wheels.

    In future work, Sakashita wants to supercharge VRoxy with robotic arms that would allow remote users to interact with physical objects in the live space via the robot proxy.

    This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Nakajima Foundation.

    Resource : https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/10/231027110752.htm

    5Mar, 2021
    This soft robot withstands crushing pressures at the ocean’s greatest depths
    robot swimming in South China Sea
    Inspired by the deep-sea snailfish, researchers designed a soft autonomous robot that can swim in deep ocean waters. Here it navigates about 3,200 meters deep in the South China Sea.

    The team, led by roboticist Guorui Li of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, successfully field-tested the robot’s ability to swim at depths ranging from 70 meters to nearly 11,000 meters, it reports March 4 in Nature.
    Challenger Deep is the lowest of the low, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. It bottoms out at about 10,900 meters below sea level (SN: 12/11/12). The pressure from all that overlying water is about a thousand times the atmospheric pressure at sea level, translating to about 103 million pascals (or 15,000 pounds per square inch).
    The tremendous pressures at these hadal depths — the deepest ocean zone, between 6,000 and 11,000 meters — present a tough engineering challenge, Gerringer says. Traditional deep-sea robots or manned submersibles are heavily reinforced with rigid metal frames so as not to crumple — but these vessels are bulky and cumbersome, and the risk of structural failure remains high.
    Gerringer, one of the researchers who first described the deep-sea snailfish in 2014, constructed a 3-D printed soft robot version of it several years later to better understand how it swims. Her robot contained a synthesized version of the watery goo inside the fish’s body that most likely adds buoyancy and helps it swim more efficiently (SN: 1/3/18).
    But devising a robot that can swim under extreme pressure to investigate the deep-sea environment is another matter. Autonomous exploration robots require electronics not only to power their movement, but also to perform various tasks, whether testing water chemistry, lighting up and filming the denizens of deep ocean trenches, or collecting samples to bring back to the surface. Under the squeeze of water pressure, these electronics can grind against one another.
    This machine “pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved” with biologically inspired soft robots, write robotocists Cecilia Laschi of the National University of Singapore and Marcello Calisti of the University of Lincoln in England. The pair have a commentary on the research in the same issue of Nature. That said, the machine is still a long way from deployment, they note. It swims more slowly than other underwater robots, and doesn’t yet have the power to withstand powerful underwater currents. But it “lays the foundations” for future such robots to help answer lingering questions about these mysterious reaches of the ocean, they write
    Deep-sea trenches are known to be teeming with microbial life, which happily feed on the bonanza of organic material — from algae to animal carcasses — that finds its way to the bottom of the sea. That microbial activity hints that the trenches may play a significant role in Earth’s carbon cycle, which is in turned linked to the planet’s regulation of its climate.The discovery of microplastics in Challenger Deep is also incontrovertible evidence that even the bottom of the ocean isn’t really that far away, Gerringer says (SN: 11/20/20). “We’re impacting these deep-water systems before we’ve even found out what’s down there. We have a responsibility to help connect these seemingly otherworldly systems, which are really part of our planet.”


    Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-soft-robot-snailfish-crushing-pressures-deep-ocean