Claire chatted to Dan Nicholson from Maker Forge about creating open source robotics projects you can do at home. Dan Nicholson is a seasoned Software Engineering Manager with over 20 years of experience as a software engineer and architect. Four years ago, he began exploring robotics as a hobby, which quickly evolved into a large-scale bipedal robotics project that has inspired a wide audience. After making the project open-source and 3D printable, Dan built a vibrant community around it, with over 25k followers. Dan shares insights and project details while collaborating with partners and fellow makers to continue expanding the project's impact.

Autonomous robots combine skills to form increasingly complex behaviors, called missions. While skills are often programmed at a relatively low abstraction level, their coordination is architecturally separated and often expressed in higher-level languages or frameworks. State machines have been the go-to language to model behavior for decades, but recently, behavior trees have gained attention among roboticists. Although several implementations of behavior trees are in use, little is known about their usage and scope in the real world.How do concepts offered by behavior trees relate to traditional languages, such as state machines? How are concepts in behavior trees and state machines used in actual applications? This paper is a study of the key language concepts in behavior trees as realized in domain-specific languages (DSLs), internal and external DSLs offered as libraries, and their use in open-source robotic applications supported by the Robot Operating System (ROS). We analyze behavior-tree DSLs and compare them to the standard language for behavior models in robotics:state machines. We identify DSLs for both behavior-modeling languages, and we analyze five in-depth.We mine open-source repositories for robotic applications that use the analyzed DSLs and analyze their usage. We identify similarities between behavior trees and state machines in terms of language design and the concepts offered to accommodate the needs of the robotics domain. We observed that the usage of behavior-tree DSLs in open-source projects is increasing rapidly. We observed similar usage patterns at model structure and at code reuse in the behavior-tree and state-machine models within the mined open-source projects. We contribute all extracted models as a dataset, hoping to inspire the community to use and further develop behavior trees, associated tools, and analysis techniques.

Robotics technology (you can also say robotics for better understanding) is a point where the strengths of science, technology, and engineering combine together with a purpose of producing machines i.e. robots imitating the behavior and potential of a human being. As per the statistics of Allied Market Research, the global robotics market size will affordably grow up to 189.36 billion dollars by the year 2027. Does this not mean that industries of various sectors like automobile, healthcare, defence and security, etc. will adopt robotics and integrate it with those applications serving a wider range of objectives bound to growth and awareness, even in this COVID era full of complications?? Indeed, for achieving such complex and time-based objectives, robots need to be trained so that they may understand how to respond to changing environments which is possible through robot programming. Curious to know how will it make a robot really self-learning? From planning an event to attending patients in a hospital, all this can be done amazingly by those self-learning robots once their capabilities are extended or detailed changes are made in their designs.

The Carnegie Mellon University Libraries latest exhibition highlights the history of robotics at CMU and the ongoing work of The Robotics Project to preserve the legacy of the field. The exhibition, "Looking Back To Move Forward / A Re:collection of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon," opened Jan. 19 and runs through Friday, March 18, in the Hunt Library gallery. A virtual tour is available for visitors to explore the exhibition remotely. Curated by archivist and oral historian Katherine Barbera and Kathleen Donahoe, the Robot Archive processing archivist, "Looking Back To Move Forward" invites viewers to explore the history and the wide variety of research areas that CMU is known for, including field robotics, artificial intelligence and human-robot interaction, among others. Visitors will see more than 40 robots and archival artifacts -- such as soccer robots, snake robots, a nurse robot called "Pearl," a "Snackbot" autonomous food-delivery robot, and "Terregator," one of the first outdoor autonomous vehicles -- along with personal recollections from the people who made it all happen.

In a grainy video shot in the early 1980s on Carnegie Mellon University's campus, Ivan Sutherland rides on top of the Trojan Cockroach, a six-legged machine considered the first controlled by a computer and capable of carrying a person. Sutherland puts the machine through its paces, slowly walking forward, backward and sideways and turning 180 degrees in the video. At one point, he attempts to balance the massive machine on only two legs. "We believe that a mastery of balance will be important to future walking machines," Sutherland narrates over the footage. That Trojan Cockroach video, complete with Sutherland's prophetic comments on the importance of balance to the future of legged robots, is part of a new interactive, virtual exhibit from University Libraries and the School of Computer Science at CMU that explores the beginnings of and contributions to the field of robotics.

Google's Alphabet is adding yet another chapter to its rollercoaster history of robotics projects. The company's R&D lab, dubbed Alphabet X, is working on a new breed of robots that can learn new tasks, rather than be programmed into performing them. The initiative is called the "Everyday Robot Project" because, as its name implies, it wants to build robots that can assist humans in simple tasks of everyday life. More importantly, the machines could do so even when confronted with our messy, unpredictable environments. The leader of the project, Hans Peter Brondmo, explained that robots currently operate in environments specifically designed and structured for them.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars rovers have a special place in my heart. I loved seeing pictures of Sojourner nuzzling up to rocks, and I still wonder whether it managed to drive around the Pathfinder lander after contact was lost. Spirit going silent was heartbreaking, and Opportunity continues to inspire so far beyond its expected lifetime, even as a dust storm threatens to starve it to death. And I particularly remember thinking how insane it was that Curiosity was going to drop onto the surface from a hovering robotic sky crane (!), and then being entirely overwhelmed to watch it happen flawlessly from the media room at JPL. I'm not the only person who thinks that JPL's rovers are incredible, and other rover fans have been pestering the roboticists at JPL for a cute little rover that can be built at home.

The robotics work programme implements the robotics strategy developed by SPARC, the Public-Private Partnership for Robotics in Europe (see the Strategic Research Agenda). EuRobotics regularly publishes video interviews with projects, so that you can find out more about their activities. You can also see many of these projects at the upcoming European Robotics Forum (ERF) in Tampere Finland March 13-15. Make ROS-Industrial the open-source industrial standard for intelligent industrial robots, and put Europe in a leading position within this global initiative. Presently, potential users are waiting for improved quality and quantity of ROS-Industrial components, but both can improve only when more parties contribute and use ROS-Industrial.

The robotics work programme implements the robotics strategy developed by SPARC, the Public-Private Partnership for Robotics in Europe (see the Strategic Research Agenda). EuRobotics regularly publishes video interviews with projects, so that you can find out more about their activities. You can also see many of these projects at the upcoming European Robotics Forum (ERF) in Tampere Finland March 13-15. RobMoSys will coordinate the whole community's best and consorted efforts to realize a step-change towards an industry-grade software development ecosystem. RobMoSys envisions a model-driven integration approach built around the current code-centric robotic platforms.

The robotics work programme implements the robotics strategy developed by SPARC, the Public-Private Partnership for Robotics in Europe (see the Strategic Research Agenda). EuRobotics regularly publishes video interviews with projects, so that you can find out more about their activities. The project aims at aligning roboticists' visions of a future with robots with empirically-based knowledge of human needs and societal concerns through a new proximity-based human-machine ethics that take into account how individuals and community connect with robot technologies. At the core of these guidelines is the concept of collaborative learning, which permeates all aspects of REELER and will guide future SSH-ICT research. Integrating the recommendations of the REELER Roadmap for responsible and ethical learning in robotics in future robot design processes will enable the European robotics community to addresses human needs and societal concerns.