Meka Robotics

The NSF National Robotics Initiative is soliciting proposals on “The realization of co-robots acting in direct support of individuals and groups”. Proposal budgets may allow for platforms costing up to $200,000 each. The compliant force control and human-scale of a Meka M1 System make it an excellent system for your “co-robot” research. For this program, Meka is offering a single arm M1-Standard system within this budget, including:

• A2 Compliant Arm
• G2 Compliant Gripper
• S3 Sensor Head
• B1 OmniBase with Z-Lift and Computation Backpack

We can also work with you to define a custom system that best meets your needs. Please email us for additional information.

The 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) is happening in San Francisco next week. If you’re in town for the conference and have been meaning to pay Meka a visit, drop us a line (info at mekabot dot com) and we can schedule a time to visit our offices. At the IROS exhibition hall, Meka will be showcasing the latest exciting results in Whole Body Control achieved by Professor Luis Sentis on their U.T. Austin Dreamer robot. We will also be participating in the Industrial Forum: New Commercial Platforms as well as the Symposia on Grasping and Manipulation: Mechanics and Design. Stop by and say hello.

Meka is gearing up to demo our A2 Compliant Arm at ICRA 2011 in Shanghai this May 9-13th. Be sure to stop by and say hello if you’re at the conference. As part of this exposition we’ve put together a new Meka Product Video:

We are excited to announce the Meka M1 Mobile Manipulator. We’ve been building all of the sub-systems for a mobile manipulator for some time. The M1 brings these various systems together in to a single, integrated robot. With the M1 we are going for a mix of customization and standardization. The result is the M1-Custom and the M1-Standard.

M1-Standard

The M1-Standard comes with a preconfigured set of manipulator systems and sensors, enabling code-sharing across labs. It includes:

• S3 Sensor Head with Kinect  compatible interface and 5MP Ethernet camera
• Two A2 Compliant Manipulators with 6 axis force-torque sensors at the wrist
• Two G2 Compliant Grippers
• B1 Omni Base with Prismatic Lift and Computation Backpack
• Integrated Meka M3 and ROS software stacks

M1-Custom

The M1-Custom can be configured with different sensors, hands, and head, allowing you to build the perfect robot. The first M1-Custom, seen in the video below, shipped last month.

As part of the new M1 deployment, we are pushing on deeper ROS integration. We expect upcoming versions of M3 to integrate many of the great packages that the ROS community is generating.

One final bit of news: The M1-Standard is competitively priced, please contact us for a quote. Visit the M1 Product Page for more information.

We are participating in the Darpa Maximizing Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program. The DARPA M3 program  (no relation to Meka M3) seeks to demonstrate significant scientific and engineering advances in robotics that will:

• Create a significantly improved scientific framework for the rapid design and fabrication of robot systems, as well as greatly enhance robot mobility and manipulation in natural environments.
• Significantly improve robot capabilities through fundamentally new approaches to the engineering of better design tools, fabrication methods, and control algorithms.

We are partnered with two excellent teams on one year Feasibility Studies: The Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech (Charles Kemp, PI), and OtherLab (Saul Griffith, PI). Check back in a year to see some interesting new technology coming out of the Meka labs.

We are participating in the DARPA Autonomous Robotic Manipulation (ARM) Program, an ambitious project to expand the perception-driven dexterous capabilities of robot arms. Meka is on of one of three teams working towards a low-cost, dexterous robot hand. We’ve got a great team (SRI (Pablo Garcia, PI) and Stanford (Mark Cutkosky)). We look forward to the day when durable and capable robotic hands are inexpensive and plentiful.

We’ve just completed an S2R1 Humanoid head for the ISSL group at HRL in Malibu, CA. The Meka team worked closely with ISSL to create a design that has a friendly yet industrial feel, while at the same time enclosing a rich sensor suite. The resulting 7 DOF head has:

• 3-axis IMU
• Hokuyo Laser Range Finder
• 2 Point Grey narrow FOV cameras with active pan-tilt-vergence control
• 1 Point Grey wide FOV camera
• 16×8 RGB LED matrix back-projected mouth
• 6 channel microphone array
• 1 Videre Stereo Camera

We look forward to seeing what the ISSL team does with their new head!

Not long back we shipped our first S2R1 Humanoid head to the Human Centered Robotics Group at UT Austin. In this new design we emphasized a modular, customizable structure that allows for individualized sensor and shell designs for each client. A lot of engineering effort was also expended on making the eyes very agile and capable of both rapid eye saccades and smooth pursuit tracking. We worked closely with Professor Sentis to achieve a friendly anime aesthetic for the overall look, adding two 2DOF ears with RGB lighting for added expressive ability.

The new robot is named Dreamer. Stay tuned for videos…

One of the benefits of a compliant manipulator is that it can withstand impact shocks. Every joint has a elastic spring between the gearhead and the joint, allowing the joint to absorb impacts that would otherwise cause irreparable damage. We put together this quick demo to illustrate the point.