There is a significant push towards a level-5 full autonomy in self driving cars. Indeed, by some accounts over 100 Billion US dollars have been invested so far towards this goal. While it remains to be seen when we will have full car autonomy, most other “moonshot” attempts don’t have similar kind of resources to attempt to address automatization of unstructured environment.
Structured environments, present in some production areas, easily afford full autonomy (e.g., populating a circuit board, spot welding car frames or painting them). For these structured cases, robotic systems interact in a two-way fashion, namely robot:environment.
For most other unstructured environments, moonshots can only be pursued thru a process that involves a multitude of smaller intermediate steps. Each step must be achieved with limited resources and lead to benefits that generate fresh resources needed to support the subsequent step. Ultimately the goal is to achieve the moonshot with the smallest number of intermediate steps and time, but with limited resources. Many call this recurrent process “digital transformation.” Digital transformation can be visualized as a multitude of steps, each one involving a three-way interaction, namely human:robot:environment.
We dream of moonshots. Our present focus is the creation of a fully autonomous construction site in which plans are uploaded at a central office and a multitude of robotic agents perform all the work. We portioned these tasks into smaller achievable intermediate steps.
Recent Highlighted Research
See our latest publication "Variable Impedance Control with an Electrorheological Fluid Actuator" in IEEE/ASME-Transactions of Mechatronics at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8457232
See our latest publication "Work in the Time of Covid-19: Actuators and Sensors for Rehabilitation Robotics" in IEEJ Journal of Industry Applications at https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ieejjia/11/2/11_21006581/_article/-...
See our latest publication "Macro-Mini Linear Actuator using Electrorheological-fluid Brake for Impedance Modulation in Physical Human-Robot Interaction" in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9691906