Most previous distributed algorithms have their communication costs linearly depending onz,thenumber ofoutliers.

BALLU, the Buoyancy Assisted Lightweight Legged Unit, is a unique legged robot with a helium balloon body and articulated legs \fig{fig:fig1}. Since it is buoyant-assisted, BALLU is inherently stable, never falling over, while being able to walk, jump, and interact safely with people. The BALLU art installation builds on this playful platform to express fluidity, serendipity, and connection. It transforms robotic motion into an artistic visual and acoustic experience, merging technology and creativity into a dynamic, interactive display. This exhibition intentionally does not have a physical boundary for the robots, emphasizing the harmony of the technologies and humanity. This work significantly extends BALLU's existing permanent exhibition in the Seoul Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Museum, Seoul RAIM (https://anc.masilwide.com/2261), emphasizing the harmony of robotics and humanity through visual, acoustic, and physical expression.

The light and soft characteristics of Buoyancy Assisted Lightweight Legged Unit (BALLU) robots have a great potential to provide intrinsically safe interactions in environments involving humans, unlike many heavy and rigid robots. However, their unique and sensitive dynamics impose challenges to obtaining robust control policies in the real world. In this work, we demonstrate robust sim-to-real transfer of control policies on the BALLU robots via system identification and our novel residual physics learning method, Environment Mimic (EnvMimic). First, we model the nonlinear dynamics of the actuators by collecting hardware data and optimizing the simulation parameters. Rather than relying on standard supervised learning formulations, we utilize deep reinforcement learning to train an external force policy to match real-world trajectories, which enables us to model residual physics with greater fidelity. We analyze the improved simulation fidelity by comparing the simulation trajectories against the real-world ones. We finally demonstrate that the improved simulator allows us to learn better walking and turning policies that can be successfully deployed on the hardware of BALLU.

A couple years ago, we wrote about a robot called BALLU from Dennis Hong at UCLA--essentially a blimp with skinny little legs, BALLU made walking easier by taking gravity out of the equation. If your robot doesn't weigh anything, you don't have to worry about falling over, right? Inspired in part by BALLU, researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a quadrotor with legs called Aerial-Biped. Designed primarily for entertainment, Aerial-Biped enables "a richer physical expression" by automatically generating walking gaits in sync with its quadrotor body. Until someone invents a robot that can moonwalk, you can model a gait that appears normal by simply making sure that the velocity of a foot is zero as long as it's in contact with the ground.

A 14-year-old girl who wanted her body to be preserved, in case she could be cured in the future, won a historic legal fight shortly before her death. The girl, who was terminally ill with a rare cancer, was supported by her mother in her wish to be cryogenically preserved -- but not by her father. She wrote to the judge explaining that she wanted "to live longer" and did not want "to be buried underground". The girl, who died in October, has been taken to the US and preserved there. Bionic Eyes Are Coming, and They'll Make Us Superhuman Would you like to upgrade your eyes?

The 2016 IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots kicks off today. It's taking place at the Westin Resort & Spa Cancun, which sounds awful, but at least there are some cool new robots, and one of the coolest has to be BALLU, from Dennis Hong at UCLA's Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa). BALLU, or Buoyancy Assisted Lightweight Legged Unit (Professor Hong loves a good acronym), is a humanoid-ish robot with a body made of helium balloons and a pair of thin articulated legs. Since it weighs next to nothing, it never falls over, and can walk, hop, and perform a variety of other useful bipedal motions as long as you don't take it outside on a windy day. "To get creative ideas, sometimes we ask ourselves crazy, ridiculous questions," Hong told us.