Florian Pokorny presents CloudGripper
Florian Pokorny, Associate Professor of Machine Learning at KTH Royal Institute Technology and Co-Founder of Scaleup Robotics, joined our meeting on 2024-09-23. He gave a talk on CloudGripper, An Open Source Cloud Robotics Testbed for Robotic Manipulation Research, Benchmarking and Data Collection at Scale. He then answered questions on the talk, along with Muhammed Zahid, who led the development work on the CloudGripper system and also co-founded Scaleup Robotics with Florian.
Take a look at the recording of the talk using the link below:
Florian explained the necessity of large quantities of data when training models for robotics, along with using simulations to generate that data. He then went on to describe how simulation wasn't always useful for training models for the real world, hence building a setup of 32 simple grippers for gathering data on deformable objects.
This fleet of 32 robots is open to the public for experimentation - check the CloudGripper link for more information on how to access the robots. Access is free, as long as you are willing to share the data you collect!
Scaleup Robotics, the startup founded by Florian and Zahid, is focusing on educiation use cases of cloud robotics and has now designed a commercial version of the robot. This will allow the team to deploy more robots. The team is also still developing the robot design, such as providing ROS interfaces and automating access to the robots.
The Cloud Robotics Working Group is always on the lookout for more guest speakers. If you have a talk you would like to give or a suggestion of another speaker who may be interested, please let us know!