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The GRASP Lab Home Holiday Video

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Image: Turner Topping, Kod*lab PhD researcher, operating Minitaur at National Robotics Week, Museum of Science & Industry, April 2017. Kod*lab PhD researchers Turner Topping and Sonia Roberts, and Research Assistant Mitch Fogelson walked and bounded Minitaur for hundreds of visitors during National Robotics Week, April 14th and 15th, 2017 at MSI, Chicago

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Robot Zoo, Robot Revolution, The Franklin Institute, March 11, 2017

Kod*lab participated in Robot Zoo, a one day event at the Franklin Institute coinciding with the exhibition Robot Revolution. Minitaur and a hopper leg were on site to interact with visitors. Researchers gave insights about our legged robots use for desert research. See the poster here for more information.

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Kod*lab helped host “Be a Pennovator” at Pennovation on Sunday, April 23rd with robot demos, talks and a Trashbot workshop.

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Jessa Lingel “A sociotechnical approach to code and workspaces

Jessa Lingel, Assistant Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, presented her talk “A sociotechnical approach to code and workspaces” at Kod*lab’s Research Group in December 2016. There was lively discussion around the culture of tools in lab and stirring up of ideas about researchers’ relationships to their robots. For instance did you know about rubber duck debugging? As a result, Kod*lab intends to pursue further engagement in teaching and research with Jessa and her colleagues. 

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Kod*lab family of robots portrait 

Back row, left to right: Penn Jerboa, Delta Hopper, RHex.  Front row, left to right: Minitaur, Inu.

Jerboa is a 2.5Kg tailed bipedal robot with two passive-compliant underactuated legs, and a tail that can pitch as well as yaw. Jerboa can sit, stand, walk, hop, run, turn, leap, and more. Delta Hopper is a power-autonomous one-legged robot that uses direct drive motors to power hopping in three dimensions. RHex is a biologically inspired hexapod small enough for a human to carry in a backpack (10kg). Ghost Minitaur™ has high-torque brushless outrunner motors and specialized leg design that let this machine run and jump over difficult terrain. Inu is a quadrupedal robot equipped with a parallel elastic-actuated spine mechanism, allowing its back to bend in a similar manner to many animals such as squirrels and dogs. 

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Kod*lab at the Robot Zoo for Robot Revolution

Join us Saturday, March 11th, 2017 at the Robot Zoo for Robot Revolution exhibition at The Franklin Institute! What affects springiness of animal legs? Why would robots want springy legs? Springy legs let legged robots get back some of the energy they put into every step, making it easier to run. Learn how Kod*lab uses ideas about springiness from nature to make robots run better and how that's important to our desert research.

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXcsgwqO17A)

During the summer of 2016, the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences hosted 10 middle school math and science teachers from the School District of Philadelphia. The teachers spent 6+ weeks learning about and conducting research in the field of robotics while developing curriculum that could be applied in their classrooms in order to inspire and develop engineering and computer science skills in their students. Three of those teachers and their experiences in the program, are represented in this video. Funding for the Robotics Research Experience for Teachers program comes from the National Science Foundation (#1542301). For more information, visit: https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/programs/research-experience-teachers-ret.

Special thanks to Dan Ueda, Ashley Viechweg, Cashonna Thomas and Danelle Ross.

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzmcN9MGgIA) The springiness of RHex's legs is due to their mechanical design. In every step, the legs store energy during compression in the first part of stance and then release some of that energy during the second part of stance. While the specific design of the legs has changed through the years, every iteration of RHex has included mechanically springy legs.http://kodlab.seas.upenn.edu/Haldunk/ISER2000

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Kod*lab post-doc, Paul Reverdy has a series of papers

1) “Parameter estimation in softmax decision-making models with linear objective functions”

This paper studies the parameter estimation problem for a model of human decision making.

2) “Gaussian multi-armed bandit problems with multiple objectives”

3) “Mobile robots as remote sensors for spatial point process models”

This paper develops control schemes to help robots develop statistically-rigorous measurements of the density of objects in space, for example the density of plants in a domain.

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Anna Brill, Kod*lab Undergraduate Researcher

Penn undergraduate, Anna Brill, took a year off from research with Kod*lab to be a Robot Technician for the Museum of Science & Industry, Chicago's Robot Revolution. In this video, get to know Anna at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, her next stop with the exhibit after Chicago before returning to Penn Engineering to start her senior year. Check it out to hear Anna's story and learn about her exciting and unique career path into research and robotics.

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“At Pennovation Center’s ribbon cutting ceremony, Friday, October 28th, 2016, Penn President Amy Gutmann officially launched the opening of the Pennovation Center, an iconic new landmark for Penn’s innovation ecosystem.” In March 2016, Kod*lab moved from its basement home in Towne 170 to the third floor of the building, as part of PERCH,  while the building was still under construction. Above you can see Dan Koditschek greeting visitors at the reception and talking enthusiastically about research at PERCH. More about the ribbon cutting and Ghost Robotics’s minitaur that walked the scissors to President Gutmann.

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blx1sfD3YCo)  #tbt to 2013 when Kod*lab hosted a dance competition in lab to program RHex or another lab robot to dance in preparation for our exhibition at Discovery Day at Clark Park 2014, as part of the Philadelphia Science Festival.

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Sonia Roberts (graduate student) and Shiv Dalla (undergraduate) were using Sonia's phone to record experiments in our tilting outdoor sandbox when Google decided that the boring data videos needed a little "Auto Awesome" touch. The experiments are looking at how leg and ground compliance affect specific resistance when walking on sand dunes.

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RHex at Robot Revolution at The Franklin Institute

Robot Revolution is a groundbreaking exhibition, that debuts in Philadelphia at The Franklin Institute this Saturday, October 8, 2016. See a collection of 40 cutting-edge robots from around the world, including RHex and RiSE. There are lots of interactive, hands on activities to engage with the robots. One can even operate RHex!

Visit a post from November 2015 to learn about Anna Brill, a Kod*lab undergraduate researcher, who was a Robot Technician for the same exhibit in Chicago and Denver.

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"I am a new postdoc at Kodlab. I received my Master’s degree in Physics and my Ph.D degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, where I worked with Prof. Daniel Goldman on bio-inspired robot locomotion on granular media, to discover principles that allow legged animals and robots to achieve high performance on complex granular substrates. Now I’m very excited to be a part of the Kodlab to apply those principles on RHex and hopefully develop better gait control for desert environments."

We are very happy to welcome Feifei to Kod*lab to continue her research and collaborate on robophysics in desert environments. 

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RHex robots assist aeolian scientists in desert research

This video documents our field experiments at White Sands National Monument with the RHex robot, in March 2016. It demonstrates the great potential for RHex to assist aeolian scientists in desert research. By collecting data through sensors mounted on RHex, we gather transformative datasets that are required to calibrate and verify existing and future dune dynamics and sand transport models. This work is produced by Nicholas Lancaster, Desert Research Institute, and will be presented at the 2016 Geological Society of America Conference. Title: "Measurement of aeolian processes with a robotic platform" Abstract: Understanding the dynamics of sand movement on dunes and dust emissions from natural and disturbed surfaces requires measurements of boundary layer winds and rates of sediment transport and dust emissions at high temporal and spatial resolution during strong wind events. Existing instrumentation has many limitations: installing it is very labor intensive and disturbs the fragile surfaces of interest. Once installed, it is fixed in space, and can only be deployed for a short time. The very existence of the instruments affects the wind field and probably the rates of sediment transport. Legged robots are agile and have proved to be able to cope with the challenges of a mobile substrate and a harsh environment, and can carry a versatile instrument package to measure wind speed and direction, sand transport, and dust emissions, located in space and time using a high-resolution GPS receiver. We now have a new technology to address a central problem in aeolian research – how to get good measurements of critical parameters in difficult conditions. We present the results of our initial field experiments at White Sands National Monument and Jornada Experimental Range that demonstrate the unique capabilities of the RHex robot to acquire high spatial and temporal resolution field data with minimal surface disturbance and flow interference as well as to interact with pre-existing surface characteristics and directly measure substrate responses under precise driving forces.