Omnid mocobots at MARS 2024

In March 2024, Northwestern University's Center for Robotics and Biosystems demonstrated the Omnid mobile collaborative robots (mocobots) at MARS, a conference in Ojai, California on Machine learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space, hosted by Jeff Bezos. The "swarm" of mocobots is designed to collaborate with humans, allowing a human to easily manipulate large, heavy, or awkward payloads. In this case, the mocobots cancel the effect of gravity, so the human can easily manipulate the mock airplane wing in six degrees of freedom. In general, human-cobot systems combine the best of human capabilities with the best of robot capabilities.

From January to early March, a team of students worked late nights to modify the electronics, mechanical systems, and software of the Omnids to improve their performance and make them robust enough for extended offsite use.

To learn more about the Omnids, check out the video at    • Human-multirobot collaborative mobile mani...   and the paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14293 (final version: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/... )

A news story about the Omnid MARS expedition can be found here: https://www.mccormick.northwestern.ed...

Omnid team members at MARS were Kevin Lynch and Matt Elwin (project leads), Lin Liu (PhD student and lead engineer), Davin Landry (research engineer), and Damien Koh (undergraduate). The team behind the scenes were students Terry Zhang, Gautham Anne, Aya Ben-Saghroune, Jonathan Chan, Adwait Ganguly, Thomas Hoang, Yanni Kechriotis, Ami Takamatsu, Alazar Tegegnework, Cristian Villazhanay, and Mark Zhang. Thanks also to the original Omnid team, including Billie Strong, Elton Cheng, Michael Doody, Anna Duban, Isaac Heine, Aamir Hussain, Rico Jia, Anuj Karnik, Andrew McIntosh, J. D. Mena, Nick Morales, Yuchen Rao, Josh Schwartz-Dodek, Jarvis Schultz, Ben Sullivan, Chainatee Tanakulrungson, Solomon Wiznitzer, Hang Yin, Pijuan Yu, and Winston Zhao.

Learn more about the Center for Robotics and Biosystems here: https://robotics.northwestern.edu/