NTNU Educational Robotics Center Overview

Jacky Baltes
National Taiwan Normal University
Taipei, Taiwan
jacky.baltes@ntnu.edu.tw
27 October 2020

ERC at NTNU

  • International research team with world-class reputation
  • Visiting professors: 1 * Brasil, 1 * Iran, 1 * Germany, 1 * France
  • 1 Post-doc: 1 * Korea
  • Ph.D. 1 * Korea, 1 * Brasil
  • M.Sc. 3 * Taiwan, 2 * Indonesia, 1 * Brasil

ERC Research

  • Intelligent humanoid robotics
  • Machine learning
  • Computer vision
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Robot competitions

Kid Size Robot: Liquid Motion

Competition FIRA, IROS
Height 45.5cm
Weight 3.0kg
Degrees of Freedom 22
Motion Controller CM-730 (ARM Cortex-M3)
Main Controller Fit PC (Intel Atom N2600)
Actuators Robotis MX-28
Sensors Webcam, IMU
Walking Speed 24 cm/sec.
Motions Forward and inverse kinematics, parameterized omni-directional walk engine
Human Robot Interaction Voice recognition, TTS, MP3

Awards

FIRA 2019 HuroCup Kid AR 2nd Place

Teen Sized Robot: ZSTT-NTNU

Competition FIRA, IROS, RoboCup
Height 85cm
Weight 7.5kg
Degrees of Freedom 26
Motion Controller OpenCM 9.04 (Arm Cortex-M3)
Main Controller Lattepanda (Intel Atom Z8300)
Actuators Robotis MX-106, MX-64
Sensors Webcam, IMU, DMS
Walking Speed 30 cm/sec.
Motions Forward and inverse kinematics, parameterized omni-directional walk engine
Human Robot Interaction Voice recognition, TTS, MP3

Awards

FIRA 2019 HuroCup All-Round 1st Place
IROS 2018 Robot-Magic 1st Place

Adult Size Robot: ZSTT-NTNU

Competition RoboCup
Height 134cm
Weight 12kg
Degrees of Freedom 20
Motion Controller OpenCM 9.04 (Arm Cortex-M3)
Main Controller Tablet PC (Intel Atom M5)
Actuators Robotis MX-106, MX-64
Sensors Webcam, IMU
Walking Speed 30 cm/sec.
Motions Forward and inverse kinematics, parameterized omni-directional walk engine
Human Robot Interaction Voice recognition, TTS, MP3

Awards

RoboCup 2018 Humanoid League Technical Challenge 3rd

Thormang 3

Competition Dr. Eureka, Archery
Height 137.5cm
Weight 42kg
Degrees of Freedom 31
Motion Controller Intel NUC with Intel Core i5
Main Controller Intel NUC with Intel Core i5
Actuators Robotis Dynamixel Pro
Sensors Webcam, IMU, Hyoku Lidar
Walking Speed 30 cm/sec.
Motions Forward and inverse kinematics, parameterized omni-directional walk engine
Human Robot Interaction Voice recognition, TTS, MP3

Awards

IEEE IROS HAC 2019 - Robot Magic and Music 1st

ERC Competition

FIRA Roboworld Cup - HuroCup All-Round

FIRA Roboworld Cup

FIRA HuroCup

  • Focus on humanoid robotics research problems
  • Walking, active balancing, uneven terrain, push recovery
  • Complex motion planning with many DOFs
  • Human robot interaction, programming by demonstration

FIRA HuroCup

  • Flexible, robust, versatile humanoid robots
  • Single robot in decathlon: archery, sprint, marathon, obstacle run, united soccer, triple jump, spartan race, weightlifting, basketball, mini-drc
  • Future applications as rescue robots

FIRA HuroCup:
Weightlifting

  • Active balancing
  • Heavy load
  • Adjust for change in center of gravity

FIRA HuroCup: Weightlifting

FIRA HuroCup:
Sprint

Run as fast as possible 3m forward, then 3m backwards

FIRA HuroCup: Sprint

FIRA HuroCup:
Marathon

  • Endurance race 425m
  • Robot follows track and markers
  • Advanced vision challenge

FIRA HuroCup:
Basketball

Manipulation and control of small objects

More difficult than kicking a ball - No second chance

FIRA HuroCup:
Archery

Highly accurate motion planning and force control

Robot Archery: Target Detection

  • Detection based on HOG features

  • Learn classifer (SVM) from training data

Robot Archery: Target Detection

ERC Competition

IROS Humanoid Application Challenge - Robot Magic

  • Attention is very important in human perception

  • Ignored in lots of AI research

  • Attention is fundamental to magic

IROS Robot Magic

Programming by Demonstration - Dr. Eureka

Dr. Eureka game is a logic game for children and adults.

Each player has three clear tubes.

  • 2 red balls
  • 2 green balls
  • 2 purple balls

A challenge card is drawn and the players then have to create the configuration shown on the card.

Players can only pour balls from one tube into another.

Dr. Eureka Game is an interesting benchmark for AI

  • Computer vision to detect challenge card
  • AI planner to find sequence of pours
  • Visual servoing for detecting and grasping tubes
  • Motion planning to pour balls from one tube to the other

Dr. Eureka Game

Visual Servoing

Inverse Kinematics (IK)

  • Neural Network for fast motions
  • Jacobian-based IK for precise motions

Humanoid Robot learns to ride a Scooter

  • Teach a large humanoid robot to ride a scooter and pass the Taiwanese driver's license test
  • Challenging balancing and manipulation problem

Job Prospects

  • Robotics produces excellent problem solvers combining ME, EE, CS, and ...
  • Hollywood and Games: Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Happy Feet, Assassin's Creed)
  • Facebook, Google
  • Taiwan companies such as Garmin, Gogoro, Mediatek
  • Start-up companies Cogmation, Taibotics

Candidates

  • Excellent problem solving skills, software development in ASM, C, C++, Python, and ...
  • Highly motivated and self directed
  • I don't care so much about your GPA and SAT scores
  • Send example of previous robotics projects