00:21:22 Jennifer Johnston: Thank you for allowing us to join. My son Arly is interested in robots and we are learning. I will be off camera as we are all ill here, but appreciate the inclusion. Let me know if there anything you need from us.
00:21:46 Mitch: Welcome!
00:37:56 Mitch: Are those meetings also virtual?
00:38:16 Chas Ihler – Laptop: Yes. Visit http://robotics.snocomakers.org/wp/2022/05/19/srg-challenge-1/
00:41:48 Nathan Kohagen: ROScon is happening October 21, 2022
ROS is Robot Operating System which is an ecosystem of tools that installs on top of Linux and WIndows operating systems. There are a lot of books written about ROS and there is a lot of support in industry and academia for it.
00:44:31 Greg S: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIugHvfvpIc
00:45:16 Greg S: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvN5NjYm4wU
00:47:54 Kevin Green: Building off what Nathan said, ROS 2 is coming online and grad students I know who use ROS are pretty excited about the improvements. See https://www.openrobotics.org/blog/2022/5/12/science-robotics-paper
00:59:34 Nathan Kohagen: @Greg S, that was a really cool robot arm that you shared with us! It’s really neat that you have a coupling mechanism for the grabber! Thanks!
01:00:51 William Dalton: @Greg S
01:01:26 William Dalton: @Greg S Very clean arm design. Nice!
01:19:54 jesse: It’s a lot like a chicken.
01:22:28 Greg S: What communication protocol is running over the ethernet cables?
01:22:32 Mitch: Why do you do just PD instead of PID?
01:22:41 jesse: I’m watching this on Ubuntu.
01:28:07 Steve Kaehler: https://github.com/osudrl
01:28:14 Mitch: Are you going to talk more about the higher level handling of integral positioning later?
01:28:50 Mitch: Have many people tried three legged robots?
01:32:46 Mitch: With working towards varied environments can you get it to optimize to its current environment? Or is it optimized to the average?
01:33:27 jesse: Is it able to balance while standing still? or does it have dynamic stability?
01:41:09 Nathan Kohagen: Is that leg day or arm day? 🙂
01:46:30 vishwajeet: Can you talk a bit about how the rewards are generated? Does it compare joint-joint deviations from the reference trajectory?
01:47:57 Greg S: What happens when the foot doesn’t land entirely on a step?
01:48:19 Mitch: Did it step back going up?
01:49:48 jesse: Being able to walk over stairs without brain function goes a long way to explaining how chickens are able to do it.
01:52:46 jesse: Have you tried varying those values to see how it effects walking? and if so what happened?
01:53:08 Nathan Kohagen: current spike or heat build up?
01:53:39 Mitch: are the connections shaking loose?
01:54:24 Nathan Kohagen: error accumulation
01:54:39 Nathan Kohagen: accelerometer drift?
01:54:42 Aaron Shaw: timing variable overflow?
01:54:47 Mitch: the number for time count getting too big?
01:54:58 Richard Greenway: Aliasing?
01:58:08 jesse: Man, that’s nuts.
01:59:08 Nathan Kohagen: @jesse 🙂
02:00:41 jesse: Most birds do it on their toes.
02:01:32 Mitch: That was really interesting, thanks for the talk.
02:02:06 jesse: What even is a PHD defense
02:03:10 vishwajeet: Does the policy learned in simulation translate directly to real world on boot-up?
02:03:18 Nathan Kohagen: That was awesome! Nice insight on how Cassie was handling stairs. The failure modes were also interesting!
02:03:36 Nathan Kohagen: WAS handling stairs.
02:04:11 vishwajeet: Wow!
02:04:53 jesse: What other simulation software have you used, and why did you reject them?
02:07:08 Kevin Green: Botball
02:07:41 Steve Kaehler: https://www.kipr.org/botball
02:08:20 Mitch: Was the “integral” portion of the controller fully learned on its own?
02:08:21 Nathan Kohagen: DOJO is a new simulator.
02:10:01 Steve Kaehler: MuJoCo — Advanced Physics Simulation: https://mujoco.org
02:10:28 Mitch: That’s super cool!
02:10:49 Nathan Kohagen: Gazebo is a common robotics simulator that has been around a long time.
Autodesk (maker of AutoCAD) has an open source simulator, Synthesis, that is promoted by FIRST Robotics.
02:11:42 Nathan Kohagen: There are some simulators listed here, but many of the newer simulators aren’t listed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotics_simulator
02:13:33 Mitch: https://www.gymlibrary.ml/
02:15:33 Steve Kaehler: https://paperswithcode.com/method/trpo
02:17:38 Mitch: https://odriverobotics.com/
02:18:01 Nathan Kohagen: https://github.com/odriverobotics/ODrive
02:19:26 bhanug: Thank you!
02:19:33 Nathan Kohagen: Thank you, Kevin!
02:19:35 Lloyd Moore: Great talk thanks!!!
02:19:39 Mitch: Thanks again for the talk, really neat work!
02:20:20 Nathan Kohagen: If there are FIRST robotics teams (FIRST Lego League & Jr., FIRST Tech Challenge, or FRC) that is probably the best way for children to get involved in robotics. https://www.firstinspires.org/
02:20:38 Nathan Kohagen: And Vex teams.
02:21:09 Nathan Kohagen: https://www.vexrobotics.com/
02:21:36 Nathan Kohagen: Vex Pro parts are used in FRC (First Robotics Challenge).
Robot Studies Penguins in Antarctica:
https://www.weforum.org/videos/tiny-robot-studies-penguins-in-antarctica
High Jumping Robot:
https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2022/020619/hitting-news-heights?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email
Robotic Automatic Laundry:
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-05-robotic-automated-laundry.html