#439333 Rocket Mining System Could Blast Ice ...

Realistically, in-situ resource utilization seems like the only way of sustaining human presence outside of low Earth orbit. This is certainly the case for Mars, and it’s likely also the case for the Moon—even though the Moon is not all that far away (in the context of the solar system). It’s stupendously inefficient to send stuff there, especially when that stuff is, with a little bit of effort, available on the Moon already.
A mix of dust, rocks, and […] Continue Reading…

Posted in Human Robots

#439331 Video Friday: Telexistence

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
RoboCup 2021 – June 22-28, 2021 – [Online Event]
RSS 2021 – July 12-16, 2021 – [Online Event]
Humanoids 2020 – July 19-21, 2021 – [Online Event]
RO-MAN 2021 – August 8-12, 2021 – [Online Event]
DARPA SubT […] Continue Reading…

Posted in Human Robots

#439327 It’s (Still) Really Hard for Robots to ...

Every time we think that we’re getting a little bit closer to a household robot, new research comes out showing just how far we have to go. Certainly, we’ve seen lots of progress in specific areas like grasping and semantic understanding and whatnot, but putting it all together into a hardware platform that can actually get stuff done autonomously still seems quite a way off.
In a paper presented at ICRA 2021 this month, researchers from the University of […] Continue Reading…

Posted in Human Robots

#439320 Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They ...

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE.
A chilling future that some had said might not arrive for many years to come is, in fact, already here. According to a recent UN report, a drone airstrike in Libya from the spring of 2020—made against Libyan National Army forces by Turkish-made STM Kargu-2 drones on behalf of Libya’s Government of National […] Continue Reading…

Posted in Human Robots

#439316 Tencent’s New Wheeled Robot Flicks Its ...

Ollie (I think its name is Ollie) is a “a novel wheel-legged robot” from Tencent Robotics. The word “novel” is used quite appropriately here, since Ollie sports some unusual planar parallel legs atop driven wheels. It’s also got a multifunctional actuated tail that not only enables some impressive acrobatics, but also allows the robot to transition from biped-ish to triped-ish to stand up extra tall and support a coffee-carrying manipulator.

It’s a little disappointing that the tail […] Continue Reading…

Posted in Human Robots