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What’s New in Robotics?

A humanoid form isn’t the most popular robot build when it comes to underwater exploration. In fact, one’s never been built, until now.To get more news about Robotics as a Service, you can visit glprobotics.com official website.

So, it came as a big deal when a subsea humanoid robot named OceanOne, while 500 meters down in the Mediterranean, allowed Stanford University’s Oussama Khatib, above on a research vessel, to experience sight and touch as the robot explored a sunken cruise ship.You are moving very close to this amazing structure [the cruise ship] and something incredible happens when you touch it: You actually feel it," said Khatib, which also had never been done before.

OceanOne, with a humanoid upper torso and a lower half of eight multi-directional thrusters, has a haptic feedback system in its hands and sees with stereoscopic vision, and offers “incredibly realistic sensations” of everything it sees and touches.

According to Khatib, director of the Stanford Robotics Lab, the mission of OceanOne has two purposes: “to explore places no one has gone before and to show that human touch, vision, and interactivity can be brought to these sites far-removed from where people can operate.”

"This is the first time that a robot has been capable of going to such a depth, interacting with the environment, and permitting the human operator to feel that environment," said Khatib.
Fresh out of stealth mode, San Francisco-based Polymath Robotics, basically asks the question: Got an industrial vehicle that you want to automate? Any vehicle, like an automated robot, forklift or tractor will do; as long as it’s to operate in a controlled environment, such as a warehouse, construction site, farm, or work yard.

Polymath has developed a plug-and-play software platform (plus SDK or System Development Kit) that allows companies to quickly and cost-efficiently automate industrial vehicles.

The software is hardware agnostic and provides all the necessary control for path planning, hazard detection, behavior trees, human detection, turning, and safe operation. Polymath claims that its basic generalizable autonomy software has a marketplace “of 50 million or so industrial vehicles that are operating in closed environments today.”

Polymath’s platform, says the startup, lets a warehouse owner, or builder, farmer or mining company bypass “the often-long process of building out autonomy, a safety layer and front-end app.”

In truth, Polymath does need a bit of help in making, say a tractor, autonomously operate by itself; it needs a piece of hardware, like a retrofit, installed on the vehicle. “Polymath has partnered with Idaho-based startup Sygnal Technologies to help on the hardware side of things by providing the necessary retrofit with its drive-by-wire kit.
Brighton, Colorado-based Outrider, on the other hand, makes autonomy gear for single-purpose automation, i.e., automating vehicles for yard operations at logistics hubs.

Yard trucks remain at a single location hitching up to and moving trailer-truck trailers from in and out of loading bays and/or other parking positions or slots.

automating vehicles for yard operations at logistics hubs“Distribution yards are harsh industrial environments with around-the-clock operations,” says Andrew Smith, Outrider founder and CEO, “that require rugged, easy-to-service and remotely supportable products.”

Fitted atop the yard vehicle, Outrider’s autonomy kit includes the “NVDIA Drive compute architecture for perception system processing; Ouster’s high-resolution LiDAR sensors for perception; and Yaskawa’s industrial robotic arm for connecting and disconnecting trailer lines.” July of 2022, Outrider announced its next-generation autonomy kit for yard automation. “Supporting over-the-air software updates and field-swappable units.”Outrider has branched into an autonomy-ready electric (EV) yard truck offering. Together with its customers, it has purchased 24 of these EV vehicles for expanded customer pilot programs and test operations with the latest autonomy kit.

In addition, “Outrider automates other manual tasks traditionally performed in the yard, such as autonomously hitching and unhitching trailers; connecting and disconnecting trailer lines; interacting safely with loading docks; tracking trailer locations; and integrating with supply chain management systems.”