Inside a UNC-Chapel Hill Science lab sits an autonomous robot. Imagine a machine like a Roomba, but with an arm, so it can pick up things like a dirty sock off the floor. A group of researchers from UNC's Chemistry and Computer Science departments are working together on the robot.
"So, it's quite fun to operate and actually, you can teach it different motions," said Angelos Angelopoulos, a fourth-year graduate student at UNC who is helping with the effort.
Angelopoulos said the autonomous blue and white robot named Fetch can move around without the help of humans.
Fetch has six motors in its arm. That way it can move in six different directions.
"It also has a torso, which means a platform that can raise and lower," Angelopoulos said. "And that enables it to reach higher tables."
Angelopoulos said most people are used to seeing a robot that looks similar to a human, but he believes that's unnecessary for robots working in a science lab.
The backstory of Fetch, the autonomous robot
"So, this robot was originally designed for warehouse logistics," said Ron Alterovitz, one of the leads on the project, who is also an associate chair for UNC's Faculty Affairs Department of Computer Science. "So you can imagine, it goes around a warehouse with a bunch of corridors. It picks up objects off the shelves and then moves them somewhere else. And for that, it didn't really need two arms."
Although Fetch was originally used for a warehouse setting, UNC Professor Ron Alterovitz said changing Fetch's environment still allowed the team to finish the tasks programmed through coding.
He added that Fetch's head is a camera that uses 3-D sensing technology, which helps it navigate where to move.
"It can determine if a person is walking nearby, and based on that information, it can ensure its safety while accomplishing the task it wants to do," said Alterovitz. "And, so the software will then take that sensed information and then compute what actions should these motors do.
One of the simple tasks Fetch does includes using a GC tube that measures things like liquids and gas.
"So, we developed a robot that can move through the chemistry lab safely, and it can get a sample, and then bring it over to a GC instrument, for example, and inject that sample into that instrument," said Alterovitz.
He said right now, the AI robot can particularly do a small number of tasks, but the challenging part requires a lot of precision and accuracy in order to perform well in a chemistry lab.
"Our biggest next step is really increasing the library of skills, or the vocabulary of the robot. We want it to be able to go into a lab and be able to help on a wide variety of tasks," said Alterovitz.
Collaborating on the robotics project
Alterovitz said the project got its start after he gave a presentation about autonomous robots at a conference.
And, UNC professor Jim Cahoon – the other lead on the team – then introduced the idea of collaborating, while they were there.
He said funding through an award from the UNC Creativity Hub really helped get the ball rolling. That's a program that funds research projects at UNC-Chapel Hill.
"We were awarded this creativity hub, which I think gave $250,000 per year for two years to fund this concept," said Cahoon.
Cahoon said now as those funds are depleting, they are looking at new federal opportunities that could fund the work on their robotics project. While federal cuts have already impacted some university programs, officials with UNC said it will not disrupt or pause this project.
The next steps of the project
Meanwhile, UNC grad student Angelopoulos said they still have more work to do and he is excited about the next steps of this robotics project.
"Ideally, we want to create reusable methods that can be applied to other robots in the future, not just this one," he said.
Moving forward, Angelopoulos said the group also wants to look for newer emerging research that enables them to advance or upgrade what the Fetch robot can do.
Meanwhile, on top of UNC, other universities in North Carolina are also using AI robots. They include North Carolina A&T State University, North Carolina State University, and Duke University. A&T is using an autonomous robot to deliver food on campus to students and staff, while N.C. State is using two robots to gather data on plant species. Duke University researchers have invented a program that uses written prompts to build robots in minutes.
