NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell held a news conference today after the second day of the annual owners meeting. Watch his remarks in the player above.

NFL players will be encouraged to stand for the national anthem at the start of the football games, the league’s chief told reporters today.

After two days of meeting with owners of each NFL team, representatives for the players’ union and players themselves, the NFL has reiterated its decision to keep its existing policy of not requiring players to stand during the anthem. Goodell said yesterday that the league wouldnot instate a rule that would penalize players who refuse to stand for the anthem.

“We believe everyone should stand for the national anthem,” he told reporters at a news conference today. “That’s an important part of our policy. It’s also an important part of our game that we all take great pride in. And it’s also important for us to honor our flag and our country and I think our fans expect us to do that.”

Goodell’s remarks came after President Donald Trump continued his criticism of the NFL this morning. On Twitter, Trump said: “The NFL has decided that it will not force players to stand for the playing of our National Anthem. Total disrespect for our great country!”

After former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the anthem last year to protest police killings of unarmed black men, dozens of other players joined him to draw greater attention to social and racial injustice. Last month, Trump said the NFL ought to fire players who didn’t stand for the anthem.

The players “are not doing this in any way to be disrespectful to the flag,” Goodell said today. “But they also understand how it’s being interpreted.”

Goodell also said the league wanted to stay out of the political arena over the issue.

“We’re not looking to get into politics,” he told reporters. “What we’re looking to do is to continue to get people focused on football.”

The post WATCH: NFL commissioner says players ‘should stand for the national anthem’ appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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In the 1960s and 1970s, NASA spent a lot of time thinking about whether toroidal (donut-shaped) fuel tanks were the way to go with its spacecraft. Toroidal tanks have a bunch of potential advantages over conventional spherical fuel tanks. For example, you can fit nearly 40% more volume within a toroidal tank than if you were using multiple spherical tanks within the same space. And perhaps most interestingly, you can shove stuff (like the back of an engine) through the middle of a toroidal tank, which could lead to some substantial efficiency gains if the tanks could also handle structural loads.

Because of their relatively complex shape, toroidal tanks are much more difficult to make than spherical tanks. Even though these tanks can perform better, NASA simply doesn’t have the expertise to manufacture them anymore, since each one has to be hand-built by highly skilled humans. But a company called Machina Labs thinks that they can do this with robots instead. And their vision is to completely change how we make things out of metal.

The fundamental problem that Machina Labs is trying to solve is that if you want to build parts out of metal efficiently at scale, it’s a slow process. Large metal parts need their own custom dies, which are very expensive one-offs that are about as inflexible as it’s possible to get, and then entire factories are built around these parts. It’s a huge investment, which means that it doesn’t matter if you find some new geometry or technique or material or market, because you have to justify that enormous up-front cost by making as much of the original thing as you possibly can, stifling the potential for rapid and flexible innovation.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the also very slow and expensive process of making metal parts one at a time by hand. A few hundred years ago, this was the only way of making metal parts: skilled metalworkers using hand tools for months to make things like armor and weapons. The nice thing about an expert metalworker is that they can use their skills and experience to make anything at all, which is where Machina Labs’ vision comes from, explains CEO Edward Mehr who co-founded Machina Labs after spending time at SpaceX followed by leading the 3D printing team at Relativity Space.

“Craftsmen can pick up different tools and apply them creatively to metal to do all kinds of different things. One day they can pick up a hammer and form a shield out of a sheet of metal,” says Mehr. “Next, they pick up the same hammer, and create a sword out of a metal rod. They’re very flexible.”

The technique that a human metalworker uses to shape metal is called forging, which preserves the grain flow of the metal as it’s worked. Casting, stamping, or milling metal (which are all ways of automating metal part production) are simply not as strong or as durable as parts that are forged, which can be an important differentiator for (say) things that have to go into space. But more on that in a bit.

The problem with human metalworkers is that the throughput is bad—humans are slow, and highly skilled humans in particular don’t scale well. For Mehr and Machina Labs, this is where the robots come in.

“We want to automate and scale using a platform called the ‘robotic craftsman.’ Our core enablers are robots that give us the kinematics of a human craftsman, and artificial intelligence that gives us control over the process,” Mehr says. “The concept is that we can do any process that a human craftsman can do, and actually some that humans can’t do because we can apply more force with better accuracy.”

This flexibility that robot metalworkers offer also enables the crafting of bespoke parts that would be impractical to make in any other way. These include toroidal (donut-shaped) fuel tanks that NASA has had its eye on for the last half century or so.

Machina Labs’ CEO Edward Mehr (on right) stands behind a 15 foot toroidal fuel tank.Machina Labs

“The main challenge of these tanks is that the geometry is complex,” Mehr says. “Sixty years ago, NASA was bump-forming them with very skilled craftspeople, but a lot of them aren’t around anymore.” Mehr explains that the only other way to get that geometry is with dies, but for NASA, getting a die made for a fuel tank that’s necessarily been customized for one single spacecraft would be pretty much impossible to justify. “So one of the main reasons we’re not using toroidal tanks is because it’s just hard to make them.”

Machina Labs is now making toroidal tanks for NASA. For the moment, the robots are just doing the shaping, which is the tough part. Humans then weld the pieces together. But there’s no reason why the robots couldn’t do the entire process end-to-end and even more efficiently. Currently, they’re doing it the “human” way based on existing plans from NASA. “In the future,” Mehr tells us, “we can actually form these tanks in one or two pieces. That’s the next area that we’re exploring with NASA—how can we do things differently now that we don’t need to design around human ergonomics?”

Machina Labs’ ‘robotic craftsmen’ work in pairs to shape sheet metal, with one robot on each side of the sheet. The robots align their tools slightly offset from each other with the metal between them such that as the robots move across the sheet, it bends between the tools. Machina Labs

The video above shows Machina’s robots working on a tank that’s 4.572 m (15 feet) in diameter, likely destined for the Moon. “The main application is for lunar landers,” says Mehr. “The toroidal tanks bring the center of gravity of the vehicle lower than what you would have with spherical or pill-shaped tanks.”

Training these robots to work metal like this is done primarily through physics-based simulations that Machina developed in house (existing software being too slow), followed by human-guided iterations based on the resulting real-world data. The way that metal moves under pressure can be simulated pretty well, and although there’s certainly still a sim-to-real gap (simulating how the robot’s tool adheres to the surface of the material is particularly tricky), the robots are collecting so much empirical data that Machina is making substantial progress towards full autonomy, and even finding ways to improve the process.

An example of the kind of complex metal parts that Machina’s robots are able to make.Machina Labs

Ultimately, Machina wants to use robots to produce all kinds of metal parts. On the commercial side, they’re exploring things like car body panels, offering the option to change how your car looks in geometry rather than just color. The requirement for a couple of beefy robots to make this work means that roboforming is unlikely to become as pervasive as 3D printing, but the broader concept is the same: making physical objects a software problem rather than a hardware problem to enable customization at scale.

This is a sponsored article brought to you by Khalifa University of Science and Technology.

A total of eight intense competitions to inspire creativity and innovation along with 13 forums dedicated to diverse segments of robotics and artificial intelligence will be part of the 36th edition of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) in Abu Dhabi.

These competitions at the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s first-ever global conference and exhibition from 14-18 October 2024 at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center (ADNEC) will highlight some of the key aspects of robotics. These include physical or athletic intelligence of robots, remote robot navigation, robot manipulation, underwater robotics, perception and sensing as well as challenges for wildlife preservation.

This edition of IROS is one of the largest of its kind globally in this category because of active participation across all levels, with 5,740 authors, 16 keynote speakers, 46 workshops, 11 tutorials, as well as 28 exhibitors and 12 startups. The forums at IROS will explore the rapidly evolving role of robotics in many industry sectors as well as policy-making and regulatory areas. Several leading corporate majors, and industry professionals from across the globe are gathering for IROS 2024 which is themed “Robotics for Sustainable Development.”

“The intense robotics competitions will inspire creativity, while the products on display as well as keynotes will pave the way for more community-relevant solutions.” —Jorge Dias, IROS 2024 General Chair

Dr. Jorge Dias, IROS 2024 General Chair, said: “Such a large gathering of scientists, researchers, industry leaders and government stakeholders in Abu Dhabi for IROS 2024 also demonstrates the role of UAE in pioneering new technologies and in providing an international platform for knowledge exchange and sharing of expertise. The intense robotics competitions will inspire creativity, while the products on display as well as keynotes will pave the way for more community-relevant solutions.”

The competitions are:

• 2nd AI Olympics With RealAIGym: Is AI Ready for Athletic Intelligence in the Real World? focusing on the physical or athletic intelligence of robots

• The Earth Rovers Challenge on remote robot navigation

• Robotic Construction Challenge and the euROBIN Manipulation Skill Versatility Challenge (MSVC) on robot manipulation

• Underwater Robotics Challenges on innovation and problem-solving in underwater robotics and artificial intelligence

• ROAD-IROS: Automatic Data Annotation Challenge for ROAD Dataset on perception and sensing

• 21st F1Tenth Autonomous Racing Competition

• IEEE RAS Quadruped Robot Challenge (QRC), focusing on navigation

In addition to these competitions, the Falcon Monitoring Challenge (FMC) will focus on advancing the field of wildlife tracking and conservation through the development of sophisticated, noninvasive monitoring systems.

Khalifa University

IROS 2024 will also include three keynote talks on ‘Robotic Competitions’ that will be moderated by Professor Lakmal Seneviratne, Director, Center for Autonomous Robotic Systems (KU-CARS), Khalifa University. The keynotes will be delivered by Professor Pedro Lima, Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of. Lisbon, Portugal; Dr. Timothy Chung, General Manager, Autonomy and Robotics, Microsoft, US; and Dr. Ubbo Visser, President of the RoboCup Federation, Director of Graduate Studies, and Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Miami, US.

The forums at IROS 2024 will include:

• Robotics in Africa Forum

• Marine Robotics in Ocean Decade Initiative for Sustainable Development

• Robots for Sustainability and Sustainable Robots

• Government Forum: Funding for Robotics Research, Human-Avatars Symbiosis: Can you imagine a future society where you can remotely control multiple avatars?

• Moonshot R&D Program Goal 3 Forum. Envisioning a Future of Human-Robot Co-living: Potential for Robotics to Transform Human Lives

Other forums include:

• Sustainable Medical and Surgical Robotics

• Empowering Diverse Voices in Robotics, Robotics & AI in the UAE: Research Innovation and Entrepreneurship

• Europe Regulates Artificial Intelligence: the Challenge for Robotics, Industrial Opportunities and Socio-Economic Impact of Medical Robotics

• The Future of Work: AI-Enhanced Robotics and Human Interaction Research in M3S

• Robots for a Better Tomorrow: Wellbeing Through Advanced Technology.

One of the largest and most important robotics research conferences in the world, IROS 2024 provides a platform for the international robotics community to exchange knowledge and ideas about the latest advances in intelligent robots and smart machines. A total of 3,344 paper submissions representing 60 countries, have been received from researchers and scientists across the world. China tops the list with more than 1,000 papers, the US with 777, Germany with 302, Japan with 253, and the UK and South Korea with 173 each. The UAE remains top in the Arab region with 68 papers.

One of the largest and most important robotics research conferences in the world, IROS 2024 provides a platform for the international robotics community to exchange knowledge and ideas.

For eight consecutive years since 2017, Abu Dhabi has remained first on the world’s safest cities list, according to online database Numbeo, which assessed 329 global cities for the 2024 listing. This reflects the emirate’s ongoing efforts to ensure a good quality of life for citizens and residents. With a multicultural community, Abu Dhabi is home to people from more than 200 nationalities, and draws a large number of tourists to some of the top art galleries in the city such as Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, as well as other destinations such as Ferrari World Abu Dhabi and Warner Bros. World™ Abu Dhabi.

Because of its listing as one of the safest cities, Abu Dhabi continues to host several international conferences and exhibitions. Abu Dhabi is set to host the UNCTAD World Investment Forum, the 13th World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference (MC13), the 12th World Environment Education Congress in 2024, and the IUCN World Conservation Congress in 2025.

IROS 2024 is sponsored by IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, Abu Dhabi Convention and Exhibition Bureau, the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ), the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), the New Technology Foundation, and the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES).

More information at https://iros2024-abudhabi.org/

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