Soft robots have a continuously deformable structure with muscle-like actuation that emulates biological systems and results in a relatively large number of degrees of freedom as compared to their hard-bodied counterparts. Soft robots have the potential to exhibit unprecedented adaptation, sensitivity, and agility. Soft bodied robots promise to 1) Move with the ability to bend and twist with high curvatures and thus can be used in confined spaces; 2) Deform their bodies in a continuous way and thus achieve motions that emulate biology; 3) Adapt their shape to the environment employing compliant motion and thus manipulate un-modeled objects, or move on rough terrain and exhibit resilience; 4) Execute rapid, agile maneuvers, such as the escape maneuver in fish. We are developing new design, fabrication, modeling, control, and planning algorithms for soft robots.

Our new soft robots include a soft robot fish, a soft arm capable of manipulation in planar environments, and a soft dynamic arm capable of dynamic manipulation in three dimensional environments.

The objective is to develop data-driven customized transportation. We are developing a fleet of self-driving cars consisting of golf carts and electric cars. Mobility on demand aims to transform transportation into a utility, to be available to anybody, anytime. If you want to go somewhere, you book a ride, the robot car comes to where you are and drives you where you want to go. After dropping you off, the robot car coordinates with the other robots in the system to determine where its next pickup location is and drives itself there. An optimization engine ensures that people’s waiting times, car trajectories, and vehicles in the system are optimized.

In October 2014 we conducted a public trial at the Chinese Gardens in Singapore. We invited the public to test our mobility on demand system. During the week long trial over 500 people booked and took rides. The robot cars navigate successfully, following the road, avoiding pedestrians, bikers, and monitor lizards, and bringing passengers to their selected destinations.

Here is our Self-Driving Car Team:

and some videos from our work:

Rebalancing Cars

Autonomous Driving

Many different types of robots are available today, but each of these robots took many years to produce. The computation, mobility, and manipulation capabilities of robots are tightly coupled to the body of the robot—its hardware system. Since today’s robot bodies are fixed and difficult to extend, the capabilities of each robot are limited by its body. Fabricating new robots, add-on robotic modules, fixtures, or specialized tools to extend capabilities is not a real option, as the process of design, fabrication, assembly, and programming is long and cumbersome. We need the design and fabrication tools that will speed up the fabrication of robots. Imagine creating a robot compiler that takes as input the functional specification of the robot (for example “I want a robot to play chess with me”) and computes a design that meets the specification, a fabrication plan, and a custom programming environment for using the robot. Many tasks big and small could be automated by rapid design and fabrication of many different types of robots using such a robot compiler.

$ emacs myrobot.rbt

“I want a robot to play chess with me”

$ make myrobot

Parsing specification …done

Determining behaviors …done.

Generating mechanisms …done.

Assembling components …done.

Printing …done.

Success!

Our current solution to the robot compiler is a data-driven approach to design. Existing robot designs and supporting control algorithms that sit in a database are segmented and composed to create new robots. The user imagines a machine, say a duck robot or an ant robot and defines its behaviors (say a robot should pick up a piece and move it), 2) assemble mechanisms into an integrated design and 3) rapidly fabricates the device and its programming and control substrate.

Title of Video

Currently, whales are observed manually using binoculars and cameras from the shore or from boats, and notes are made using pencil and paper. The process is error prone, non-quantitative and very labor intensive.

We partnered with Roger Payne to observe whales and other marine animals using robots. Between August 20-25 2009, our team deployed a remote controlled Falcon 8 robot over the sea at Peninsula Valdez, Argentina to collect data on Southern Right whales. We used small hovering unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Ascending Technologies Falcon 8 robot to assist in the data collection of whales. The robot is silent enough to fly close above the water’s surface and not disturb the whales. The robot captures their natural behavior with images of unprecedented detail.

The kitchen environment is a semi- structured proving ground for algorithms in robotics. It provides many computational challenges, such as accurately perceiving ingredients in cluttered environments, manipulating objects, and engaging in complex activities such as mixing and chopping. We envision a robotic chef, the BakeBot, which can collect recipes online, parse them into a sequence of low-level actions, and execute them for the benefit of its human partners. We are working towards this goal, by combining techniques for object perception, manipulation, and language understanding to develop a novel end-to-end robot system able to follow simple recipes and by experimentally assessing the performance of these approaches in the kitchen domain.

In collaboration with Dean Anderson from the USDA we developed wearable devices for cattle. Each animal in the herd is given a smart collar consisting of a GPS, PDA, wireless networking and a sound amplifier. Using the GPS, the animal’s location can be verified relative to the fence boundary. When approaching the perimeter, the animal is presented with a sound stimulus whose effect is to move away. We have developed the virtual fence control algorithm for moving a herd and used it to collect animal data and to automatically gather animals. Our field experiments were conducted at the USDA’s Jornada Research facility in New Mexico.

This piece explores the relationship between man and machine in a pastoral fable involving a dancer and two flying robots. Set to a Schubert piano trio, the resulting work explores the expressive potential of machines, presenting in the process a commentary on the fundamental nature of dance. Seraph was performed at the Cutler Majestic theater in Boston in 2010 and at the Joyce Theater in New York City during the 2011 summer season.

The participants use the color-changing umbrellas to create images that are projected in real time on a large screen, and use this feedback along with high-level human instructions to cause the image to change. UP gives a group of untrained people umbrellas and 60 minutes to create something beautiful and moving.

The experiment is an exploration of the power of groups and the idea that groups are more capable than the sum of their parts. This project is the result of our second collaboration with Pilobolus. It was performed at PopTech in October 2012 and at MIT in May 2013. The roots of the project are in the research on collaborative decision making for robots at MIT. The Umbrella Project allows the exploration of theories on collaboration in the context of crowds and enables the extraction of hypotheses for future biologically-grounded approaches to robot control.

We are developing a robot garden: a distributed multi-robot system consisting of robot flowers, robot sheep, and robot ducks. The garden is capable of running autonomously or under user control from a simple graphical interface. Over 100 origami flowers are actuated with LEDs and printed pouch motors, and are deployed in a modular array around additional swimming and crawling folded robots. The movement and color appearance of the robots can be controlled.

The garden integrates rapid design and fabrication technologies with distributed systems software techniques to create a scalable swarm in which robots can be controlled individually or as a group. The garden can be used to program and visualize the behavior of classical graph algorithms and distributed graph algorithms. The execution sequence of such algorithms can be visualized by carefully programming the color of the flowers in the garden. The over 100 robots in this system (which can be easily extended to larger numbers) provides a large-scale platform for experimenting with robot control. We implemented a flooding algorithm, a graph-coloring algorithm, depth first search (DFS), breadth first search (BFS), and a distance-coloring algorithm in the garden as examples. We have used the Robot Garden in CSAIL’s 2014 Hour of Code event.

I had been visiting Taveuni for many years, at first for conducting experiments for my underwater research projects, and more recently to give back as part of CSAIL’s Imara outreach program. The generous and friendly people of Taveuni have always provided support for our work and it is rewarding to give back.

The Imara program started in 2007 as a computer literacy program. Jack Costanza and I traveled to Taveuni with a donation of laptops for computer literacy. Every school on the island received one laptop equipped with software for learning basic computer skills and software for learning maths, writing, and science. We conducted Teach the Teacher sessions to empower the teachers to use the computers in their classrooms. The schools on Taveuni do not have power, but the principal’s house does. Every night the principal can charge the computer. A different teacher and a different group of students get to use each day. Since 2007 I returned to Taveuni regularly with donations of various school supplies and I helped with the school curricula.

Most families on Taveuni live in villages without infrastructure. Some villages have a generator which provides them with a few hours of electricity each day, but this is not enough for the students’ homework. The children walk to school and back, often for several miles, often bare-footed, and without many school supplies. They all wear uniforms.

The Little Suns, the magical gift of light, was a perfect gift for the kids of Taveuni. They now use the Little Suns to do homework after dark, to light their path, and to help in their homes. The 2014 project was a pilot project: we had enough units to give one to every 5th, 6, 7th, and 8th grader of one school on the island, the Naselesele school. Because many families have several children in the school, we allocated one Little Sun per family to ensure the broadest benefit. The gifts were received with extraordinary wonder, delight, and smiles. I plan to return to Taveuni in 2015 with more Little Suns for the children of Taveuni.