Robot arms that assist humans should be able to pick up, move, and release everyday objects. Today's assistive robot arms use rigid grippers to pinch items between fingers; while these rigid grippers are well suited for large and heavy objects, they often struggle to grasp small, numerous, or delicate items (such as foods). Soft grippers cover the opposite end of the spectrum; these grippers use adhesives or change shape to wrap around small and irregular items, but cannot exert the large forces needed to manipulate heavy objects. In this paper we introduce RIgid-SOft (RISO) grippers that combine switchable soft adhesives with standard rigid mechanisms to enable a diverse range of robotic grasping. We develop RISO grippers by leveraging a novel class of soft materials that change adhesion force in real-time through pneumatically controlled shape and rigidity tuning. By mounting these soft adhesives on the bottom of rigid fingers, we create a gripper that can interact with objects using either purely rigid grasps (pinching the object) or purely soft grasps (adhering to the object). This increased capability requires additional decision making, and we therefore formulate a shared control approach that partially automates the motion of the robot arm. In practice, this controller aligns the RISO gripper while inferring which object the human wants to grasp and how the human wants to grasp that item. Our user study demonstrates that RISO grippers can pick up, move, and release household items from existing datasets, and that the system performs grasps more successfully and efficiently when sharing control between the human and robot. See videos here: https://youtu.be/5uLUkBYcnwg

Reconstructing force fields (FFs) from atomistic simulation data is a challenge since accurate data can be highly expensive. Here, machine learning (ML) models can help to be data economic as they can be successfully constrained using the underlying symmetry and conservation laws of physics. However, so far, every descriptor newly proposed for an ML model has required a cumbersome and mathematically tedious remodeling. We therefore propose using modern techniques from algorithmic differentiation within the ML modeling process -- effectively enabling the usage of novel descriptors or models fully automatically at an order of magnitude higher computational efficiency. This paradigmatic approach enables not only a versatile usage of novel representations and the efficient computation of larger systems -- all of high value to the FF community -- but also the simple inclusion of further physical knowledge such as higher-order information (e.g. Hessians, more complex partial differential equations constraints etc.), even beyond the presented FF domain.

Detecting objects of interest, such as human survivors, safety equipment, and structure access points, is critical to any search-and-rescue operation. Robots deployed for such time-sensitive efforts rely on their onboard sensors to perform their designated tasks. However, as disaster response operations are predominantly conducted under perceptually degraded conditions, commonly utilized sensors such as visual cameras and LiDARs suffer in terms of performance degradation. In response, this work presents a method that utilizes the complementary nature of vision and depth sensors to leverage multi-modal information to aid object detection at longer distances. In particular, depth and intensity values from sparse LiDAR returns are used to generate proposals for objects present in the environment. These proposals are then utilized by a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera system to perform a directed search by adjusting its pose and zoom level for performing object detection and classification in difficult environments. The proposed work has been thoroughly verified using an ANYmal quadruped robot in underground settings and on datasets collected during the DARPA Subterranean Challenge finals.

The team managed to find these new metals through a combination of AI and lab experiments. First, they had to overcome a significant challenge: a lack of existing data they could use to train the machine-learning models. They trained the models on the data they had--several hundred data points describing the properties of existing metal alloys. The AI system used that data to make predictions for new metals that would exhibit low invar. The researchers then created those metals in a lab, measured the results, and fed those results back into the machine-learning model.

Across industries, value chains are facing increasing uncertainty from climatic anomalies, market volatility, and the COVID-19 pandemic, among other factors. Industries as diverse as agriculture, oil and gas, and mining face essentially the same problem: they need the ability to both run with increased efficiency and recover quickly from unforeseen or unexpected challenges. But these two goals often conflict. If companies simply increase production levels, they'll inevitably run into bottlenecks--and if failures occur that worsen those bottlenecks, the entire network can slow down and become less resilient. For more on how COVID-19 has affected supply chains, see Knut Alicke, Richa Gupta, and Vera Trautwein, "Resetting supply chains for the next normal," July 21, 2020. Resolving this conflict presents several challenges.

It was known and adopted in many forms, while the most important role of it remains a posteriori analysis of the environment to guide people through their everyday lives. This research adopted the traditional practices with scientific methods aiming to explore the possibility of quantifying Feng Shui in a standardized way using modern sensors and technological approaches like machine learning. People's subjective well-being has been measured in this research as the prediction target of the environmental information in that specific room. The preliminary results suggest that this approach has the potential to assist and explain the Feng Shui rituals in certain aspects and can be further investigated.

Our goal is a question-answering (QA) system that can show how its answers are implied by its own internal beliefs via a systematic chain of reasoning. Such a capability would allow better understanding of why a model produced the answer it did. Our approach is to recursively combine a trained backward-chaining model, capable of generating a set of premises entailing an answer hypothesis, with a verifier that checks that the model itself believes those premises (and the entailment itself) through self-querying. To our knowledge, this is the first system to generate multistep chains that are both faithful (the answer follows from the reasoning) and truthful (the chain reflects the system's own internal beliefs). In evaluation using two different datasets, users judge that a majority (70%+) of generated chains clearly show how an answer follows from a set of facts - substantially better than a high-performance baseline - while preserving answer accuracy. By materializing model beliefs that systematically support an answer, new opportunities arise for understanding the model's system of belief, and diagnosing and correcting its misunderstandings when an answer is wrong.

This connection of springs is a new type of material that can change shape and learn new properties. A new type of material can learn and improve its ability to deal with unexpected forces thanks to a unique lattice structure with connections of variable stiffness, as described in a new paper by my colleagues and me. Architected materials – like this 3D lattice – get their properties not from what they are made out of, but from their structure. The new material is a type of architected material, which gets its properties mainly from the geometry and specific traits of its design rather than what it is made out of. Take hook-and-loop fabric closures like Velcro, for example.

Timely detected anomalies in the chemical technological processes, as well as the earliest detection of the cause of the fault, significantly reduce the production cost in the industrial factories. Data on the state of the technological process and the operation of production equipment are received by a large number of different sensors. To better predict the behavior of the process and equipment, it is necessary not only to consider the behavior of the signals in each sensor separately, but also to take into account their correlation and hidden relationships with each other. Graph-based data representation helps with this. The graph nodes can be represented as data from the different sensors, and the edges can display the influence of these data on each other. In this work, the possibility of applying graph neural networks to the problem of fault diagnosis in a chemical process is studied. It was proposed to construct a graph during the training of graph neural network. This allows to train models on data where the dependencies between the sensors are not known in advance. In this work, several methods for obtaining adjacency matrices were considered, as well as their quality was studied. It has also been proposed to use multiple adjacency matrices in one model. We showed state-of-the-art performance on the fault diagnosis task with the Tennessee Eastman Process dataset. The proposed graph neural networks outperformed the results of recurrent neural networks.

We report a closed-loop control system for paramagnetic catalytically self-propelled Janus microrobots. We achieve this control by employing electromagnetic coils that direct the magnetic field in a desired orientation to steer the microrobots. The microrobots move due to the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, during which they align themselves to the magnetic torques applied to them. Because the angle between their direction of motion and their magnetic orientation is a priori unknown, an algorithm is used to determine this angular offset and adjust the magnetic field appropriately. The microrobots are located using real-time particle tracking that integrates with a video camera. A target location or desired trajectory can be drawn by the user for the microrobots to follow.