Tag Archives: video
#439870 Video Friday: TurtleBot 4
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. 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!):
Silicon Valley Robot Block Party – October 23, 2021 – Oakland, CA, USASSRR 2021 – October 25-27, 2021 – New York, NY, USALet us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
We'll have more details on this next week, but there's a new TurtleBot, hooray!
Brought to you by iRobot (providing the base in the form of the new Create 3), Clearpath, and Open Robotics.
[ Clearpath ]
Cognitive Pilot's autonomous tech is now being integrated into production Kirovets K-7M tractors, and they've got big plans: “The third phase of the project envisages a fully self-driving tractor control mode without the need for human involvement. It includes group autonomous operation with a 'leader', the movement of a group of self-driving tractors on non-public roads, the autonomous movement of a robo-tractor paired with a combine harvester not equipped with an autonomous control system, and the use of an expanded set of farm implements with automated control and functionality to monitor their condition during operation.”
[ Cognitive Pilot ]
Thanks, Andrey!
Since the start of the year, Opteran has been working incredibly hard to deliver against our technology milestones and we're delighted to share the first video of our technology in action. In the video you can see Hopper, our robot dog (named after Grace Hopper, a pioneer of computer programming) moving around a course using components of Opteran Natural Intelligence, [rather than] a trained deep learning neural net. Our small development kit (housing an FPGA) sat on top of the robot dog guides Hopper, using Opteran See to provide 360 degrees of stabilised vision, and Opteran Sense to sense objects and avoid collisions.
[ Opteran ]
If you weren't paying any attention to the DARPA SubT Challenge and are now afraid to ask about it, here are two recap videos from DARPA.
[ DARPA SubT ]
A new control system, designed by researchers in MIT's Improbable AI Lab and demonstrated using MIT's robotic mini cheetah, enables four-legged robots to traverse across uneven terrain in real-time.
[ MIT ]
Using a mix of 3D-printed plastic and metal parts, a full-scale replica of NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, was built inside a clean room at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The activity served as a dress rehearsal for the flight version, which is scheduled for assembly in the summer of 2022.
[ NASA ]
What if you could have 100x more information about your industrial sites? Agile mobile robots like Spot bring sensors to your assets in order to collect data and generate critical insights on asset health so you can optimize performance. Dynamic sensing unlocks flexible and reliable data capture for improved site awareness, safety, and efficiency.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
Fish in Washington are getting some help navigating through culverts under roads, thanks to a robot developed by University of Washington students Greg Joyce and Qishi Zhou. “HydroCUB is designed to operate from a distance through a 300-foot-long cable that supplies power to the rover and transmits video back to the operator. The goal is for the Washington State Department of Transportation which proposed the idea, to use the tool to look for vegetation, cracks, debris and other potential 'fish-barriers' in culverts.”
[ UW ]
Thanks, Sarah!
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover carries two microphones which are directly recording sounds on the Red Planet, including the Ingenuity helicopter and the rover itself at work. For the very first time, these audio recordings offer a new way to experience the planet. Earth and Mars have different atmospheres, which affects the way sound is heard. Justin Maki, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Nina Lanza, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, explain some of the notable audio recorded on Mars in this video.
[ JPL ]
A new kind of fiber developed by researchers at MIT and in Sweden can be made into cloth that senses how much it is being stretched or compressed, and then provides immediate tactile feedback in the form of pressure or vibration. Such fabrics, the team suggests, could be used in garments that help train singers or athletes to better control their breathing, or that help patients recovering from disease or surgery to recover their normal breathing patterns.
[ MIT ]
Partnering with Epitomical, Extend robotic has developed a mobile manipulator and a perception system, to let anyone to operate it intuitively through VR interface, over a wireless network.
[ Extend Robotics ]
Here are a couple of videos from Matei Ciocarlie at the Columbia University ROAM lab talking about embodied intelligence for manipulation.
[ ROAM Lab ]
The AirLab at CMU has been hosting an excellent series on SLAM. You should subscribe to their YouTube channel, but here are a couple of their more recent talks.
[ Tartan SLAM Series ]
Robots as Companions invites Sougwen Chung and Madeline Gannon, two artists and researchers whose practices not only involve various types of robots but actually include them as collaborators and companions, to join Maria Yablonina (Daniels Faculty) in conversation. Through their work, they challenge the notion of a robot as an obedient task execution device, questioning the ethos of robot arms as tools of industrial production and automation, and ask us to consider it as an equal participant in the creative process.
[ UofT ]
These two talks come from the IEEE RAS Seasonal School on Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies based on Soft Robotics.
[ SofTech-Rehab ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439857 Video Friday: ANYmals and Animals
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. 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!):
ROSCon 2021 – October 20-21, 2021 – [Online Event]Silicon Valley Robot Block Party – October 23, 2021 – Oakland, CA, USASSRR 2021 – October 25-27, 2021 – New York, NY, USA
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
This project investigates the interaction between robots and animals, in particular, the quadruped ANYmal and wild vervet monkeys. We will test whether robots can be tolerated but also socially accepted in a group of vervets. We will evaluate whether social bonds are created between them and whether vervets trust knowledge from robots.
[ RSL ]
At this year's ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), the Student Innovation Contest was based around Sony Toio robots. Here are some of the things that teams came up with:
[ UIST ]
Collecting samples from Mars and bringing them back to Earth will be a historic undertaking that started with the launch of NASA's Perseverance rover on July 30, 2020. Perseverance collected its first rock core samples in September 2021. The rover will leave them on Mars for a future mission to retrieve and return to Earth. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are solidifying concepts for this proposed Mars Sample Return campaign. The current concept includes a lander, a fetch rover, an ascent vehicle to launch the sample container to Martian orbit, and a retrieval spacecraft with a payload for capturing and containing the samples and then sending them back to Earth to land in an unpopulated area.
[ JPL ]
FCSTAR is a minimally actuated flying climbing robot capable of crawling vertically. It is the latest in the family of the STAR robots. Designed and built at the Bio-Inspired and Medical Robotics Lab at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev by Nitzan Ben David and David Zarrouk.
[ BGU ]
Evidently the novelty of Spot has not quite worn off yet.
[ IRL ]
As much as I like Covariant, it seems weird to call a robot like this “Waldo” when the world waldo already has a specific meaning in robotics, thanks to the short story by Robert A. Heinlein.
Also, kinda looks like it failed that very first pick in the video…?
[ Covariant ]
Thanks, Alice!
Here is how I will be assembling the Digit that I'm sure Agility Robotics will be sending me any day now.
[ Agility Robotics ]
Robotis would like to remind you that ROS World is next week, and also that they make a lot of ROS-friendly robots!
[ ROS World ] via [ Robotis ]
Researchers at the Australian UTS School of Architecture have partnered with construction design firm BVN Architecture to develop a unique 3D printed air-diffusion system.
[ UTS ]
Team MARBLE, who took third at the DARPA SubT Challenge, has put together this video which combines DARPA's videos with footage taken by the team to tell the whole story with some behind the scenes stuff thrown in.
[ MARBLE ]
You probably don't need to watch all 10 minutes of the first public flight of Volocopter's cargo drone, but it's fun to see the propellers spin up for the takeoff.
[ Volocopter ]
Nothing new in this video about Boston Dynamics from CNBC, but it's always cool to see a little wander around their headquarters.
[ CNBC ]
Computing power doubles every two years, an observation known as Moore's Law. Prof Maarten Steinbuch, a high-tech systems scientist, entrepreneur and communicator, from Eindhoven University of Technology, discussed how this exponential rate of change enables accelerating developments in sensor technology, AI computing and automotive machines, to make products in modern factories that will soon be smart and self-learning.
[ ESA ]
On episode three of The Robot Brains Podcast, we have deep learning pioneer: Yann LeCun. Yann is a winner of the Turing Award (often called the Nobel Prize of Computer Science) who in 2013 was handpicked by Mark Zuckerberg to bring AI to Facebook. Yann also offers his predictions for the future of artificial general intelligence, talks about his life straddling the worlds of academia and business and explains why he likes to picture AI as a chocolate layer cake with a cherry on top.
[ Robot Brains ]
This week's CMU RI seminar is from Tom Howard at the University of Rochester, on “Enabling Grounded Language Communication for Human-Robot Teaming.”
[ CMU RI ]
A pair of talks from the Maryland Robotics Center, including Maggie Wigness from ARL and Dieter Fox from UW and NVIDIA.
[ Maryland Robotics ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439836 Video Friday: Dusty at Work
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. 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!):
ROSCon 2021 – October 20-21, 2021 – [Online Event]Silicon Valley Robot Block Party – October 23, 2021 – Oakland, CA, USALet us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
I love watching Dusty Robotics' field printer at work. I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but it's go so much personality somehow.
[ Dusty Robotics ]
A busy commuter is ready to walk out the door, only to realize they've misplaced their keys and must search through piles of stuff to find them. Rapidly sifting through clutter, they wish they could figure out which pile was hiding the keys. Researchers at MIT have created a robotic system that can do just that. The system, RFusion, is a robotic arm with a camera and radio frequency (RF) antenna attached to its gripper. It fuses signals from the antenna with visual input from the camera to locate and retrieve an item, even if the item is buried under a pile and completely out of view.
While finding lost keys is helpful, RFusion could have many broader applications in the future, like sorting through piles to fulfill orders in a warehouse, identifying and installing components in an auto manufacturing plant, or helping an elderly individual perform daily tasks in the home, though the current prototype isn't quite fast enough yet for these uses.[ MIT ]
CSIRO Data61 had, I'm pretty sure, the most massive robots in the entire SubT competition. And this is how you solve doors with a massive robot.
[ CSIRO ]
You know how robots are supposed to be doing things that are too dangerous for humans? I think sailing through a hurricane qualifies..
This second video, also captured by this poor Saildrone, is if anything even worse:
[ Saildrone ] via [ NOAA ]
Soft Robotics can handle my taquitos anytime.
[ Soft Robotics ]
This is brilliant, if likely unaffordable for most people.
[ Eric Paulos ]
I do not understand this robot at all, nor can I tell whether it's friendly or potentially dangerous or both.
[ Keunwook Kim ]
This sort of thing really shouldn't have to exist for social home robots, but I'm glad it does, I guess?
It costs $100, though.
[ Digital Dream Labs ]
If you watch this video closely, you'll see that whenever a simulated ANYmal falls over, it vanishes from existence. This is a new technique for teaching robots to walk by threatening them with extinction if they fail.
But seriously how do I get this as a screensaver?
[ RSL ]
Zimbabwe Flying Labs' Tawanda Chihambakwe shares how Zimbabwe Flying Labs got their start, using drones for STEM programs, and how drones impact conservation and agriculture.
[ Zimbabwe Flying Labs ]
DARPA thoughtfully provides a video tour of the location of every artifact on the SubT Final prize course. Some of them are hidden extraordinarily well.
Also posted by DARPA this week are full prize round run videos for every team; here are the top three: MARBLE, CSIRO Data61, and CERBERUS.
[ DARPA SubT ]
An ICRA 2021 plenary talk from Fumihito Arai at the University of Tokyo, on “Robotics and Automation in Micro & Nano-Scales.”
[ ICRA 2021 ]
This week's UPenn GRASP Lab Seminar comes from Rahul Mangharam, on “What can we learn from Autonomous Racing?”
[ UPenn ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439794 Video Friday: Mini Pupper
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. 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!):
IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]Robo Boston – October 1-2, 2021 – Boston, MA, USAWearRAcon Europe 2021 – October 5-7, 2021 – [Online Event]ROSCon 2021 – October 20-21, 2021 – [Online Event]Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos, more below!
Mini Pupper is now on Kickstarter!
The basic kit is $250, which includes just the custom parts, so you'll need to add your own 3D printed parts, some of the electronics, and the battery. A complete Mini Pupper kit is $500, or get it fully assembled for an extra $60.
Everything should (with all the usual Kickstarter caveats in mind) ship in November, which is plenty of time to get it to me for the holidays (for any of my family reading this).
[ Mini Pupper ]
An Inflatable robotic hand design gives amputees real-time tactile control and enables a wide range of daily activities, such as zipping a suitcase, shaking hands, and petting a cat. The smart hand is soft and elastic, weighs about half a pound, and costs a fraction of comparable prosthetics.
[ MIT ]
Among the first electronic mobile robots were the experimental machines of neuroscientist W. Grey Walter. Walter studied the brain's electrical activity at the Burden Neurological Institute (BNI) near Bristol, England. His battery-powered robots were models to test his theory that a minimum number of brain cells can control complex behavior and choice.
[ NMAH ]
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to be employed for surveillance and monitoring tasks. By perching and staring on one or multiple locations aerial robots can save energy while concurrently increasing their overall mission time without actively flying. In this paper, we address the estimation, planning, and control problems for autonomous perching on inclined surfaces with small quadrotors using visual and inertial sensing.
[ ARPL NYU ]
Human environments are filled with large open spaces that are separated by structures like walls, facades, glass windows, etc. Most often, these structures are largely passive offering little to no interactivity. In this paper, we present Duco, a large-scale electronics fabrication robot that enables room-scale & building-scale circuitry to add interactivity to vertical everyday surfaces. Duco negates the need for any human intervention by leveraging a hanging robotic system that automatically sketches multi-layered circuity to enable novel large-scale interfaces.
The key idea behind Duco is that it achieves single-layer or multi-layer circuit fabrication on 2D surfaces as well as 2D cutouts that can be assembled into 3D objects by loading various functional inks (e.g., conductive, dielectric, or cleaning) to the wall-hanging drawing robot, as well as employing an optional laser cutting head as a cutting tool. [ Duco ]
Thanks Sai!
When you can't have robots fight each other in person because pandemic, you have to get creative.
[ ROBO-ONE ]
Baidu researchers have proposed a novel reinforcement learning-based evolutionary foot trajectory generator that can continually optimize the shape of the output trajectory for a quadrupedal robot, from walking over the balance beam to climbing up and down slopes. Our approach can solve a range of challenging tasks in simulation by learning from scratch, including walking on a balance beam and crawling through a cave. To further verify the effectiveness of our approach, we deploy the controller learned in the simulation on a 12-DoF quadrupedal robot, and it can successfully traverse challenging scenarios with efficient gaits.
[ Paper ]
This is neat: a robot with just one depth camera can poke around a little bit where it can't see, and then use those contacts to give it a better idea of what's in front of it.
[ CLASP ]
Here's a robotics problem: objects that look very similar but aren't! How can you efficiently tell the difference between objects that look almost the same, and how do you know when you need to make that determination?
[ Paper ]
Hyundai Motor Group has introduced its first project with Boston Dynamics. Meet the new 'Factory Safety Service Robot', based on Boston Dynamics' quadruped, Spot, and to support industrial site safety.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
I don't necessarily know how much credit to give DARPA for making this happen, but even small drones make constrained obstacle avoidance look so easy now.
[ ARL ]
Huh, maybe all in-home robots should have spiky wheels and articulated designs, since this seems very effective.
[ Transcend Robotics ]
Robotiq, who makes the grippers that everybody uses for everything, now has a screw driving solution.
[ Robotiq ]
Kodiak's latest autonomous truck design is interesting because of how they've structured their sensors: almost everything seems to be in two chonky pods that take the place of the wing mirrors.
[ Kodiak ]
Thanks Kylee!
An ICRA 2021 plenary talk from Robert Wood, on Soft Robotics for Delicate and Dexterous Manipulation.
[ ICRA 2021 ]
This week's Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar features Henrik Christensen on “Deploying autonomous vehicles for micro-mobility on a university campus.”
[ UMD ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439743 Video Friday: Preparing for the SubT ...
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. 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!):
DARPA SubT Finals – September 21-23, 2021 – Louisville, KY, USAWeRobot 2021 – September 23-25, 2021 – [Online Event]IROS 2021 – September 27-1, 2021 – [Online Event]Robo Boston – October 1-2, 2021 – Boston, MA, USAWearRAcon Europe 2021 – October 5-7, 2021 – [Online Event]ROSCon 2021 – October 20-21, 2021 – [Online Event]Silicon Valley Robot Block Party – October 23, 2021 – Oakland, CA, USALet us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
Team Explorer, the SubT Challenge entry from CMU and Oregon State University, is in the last stage of preparation for the competition this month inside the Mega Caverns cave complex in Louisville, Kentucky.
[ Explorer ]
Team CERBERUS is looking good for the SubT Final next week, too.
Autonomous subterranean exploration with the ANYmal C Robot inside the Hagerbach underground mine
[ ARL ]
I'm still as skeptical as I ever was about a big and almost certainly expensive two-armed robot that can do whatever you can program it to do (have fun with that) and seems to rely on an app store for functionality.
[ Unlimited Robotics ]
Project Mineral is using breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, sensors, and robotics to find ways to grow more food, more sustainably.
[ Mineral ]
Not having a torso or anything presumably makes this easier.
Next up, Digit limbo!
[ Hybrid Robotics ]
Paric completed layout of a 500 unit apartment complex utilizing the Dusty FieldPrinter solution. Autonomous layout on the plywood deck saved weeks worth of schedule, allowing the panelized walls to be placed sooner.
[ Dusty Robotics ]
Spot performs inspection in the Kidd Creek Mine, enabling operators to keep their distance from hazards.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
Digit's engineered to be a multipurpose machine. Meaning, it needs to be able to perform a collection of tasks in practically any environment. We do this by first ensuring the robot's physically capable. Then we help the robot perceive its surroundings, understand its surroundings, then reason a best course of action to navigate its environment and accomplish its task. This is where software comes into play. This is early AI in action.
[ Agility Robotics ]
This work proposes a compact robotic limb, AugLimb, that can augment our body functions and support the daily activities. The proposed device can be mounted on the user's upper arm, and transform into compact state without obstruction to wearers.
[ AugLimb ]
Ahold Delhaize and AIRLab need the help of academics who have knowledge of human-robot interactions, mobility, manipulation, programming, and sensors to accelerate the introduction of robotics in retail. In the AIRLab Stacking challenge, teams will work on algorithms that focus on smart retail applications, for example, automated product stacking.
[ PAL Robotics ]
Leica, not at all well known for making robots, is getting into the robotic reality capture business with a payload for Spot and a new drone.
Introducing BLK2FLY: Autonomous Flying Laser Scanner
[ Leica BLK ]
As much as I like Soft Robotics, I'm maybe not quite as optimistic as they are about the potential for robots to take over quite this much from humans in the near term.
[ Soft Robotics ]
Over the course of this video, the robot gets longer and longer and longer.
[ Transcend Robotics ]
This is a good challenge: attach a spool of electrical tape to your drone, which can unpredictably unspool itself and make sure it doesn't totally screw you up.
[ UZH ]
Two interesting short seminars from NCCR Robotics, including one on autonomous racing drones and “neophobic” mobile robots.
Dario Mantegazza: Neophobic Mobile Robots Avoid Potential Hazards
[ NCCR ]
This panel on Synergies between Automation and Robotics comes from ICRA 2021, and once you see the participant list, I bet you'll agree that it's worth a watch.
[ ICRA 2021 ]
CMU RI Seminars are back! This week we hear from Andrew E. Johnson, a Principal Robotics Systems Engineer in the Guidance and Control Section of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on “The Search for Ancient Life on Mars Began with a Safe Landing.”
Prior mars rover missions have all landed in flat and smooth regions, but for the Mars 2020 mission, which is seeking signs of ancient life, this was no longer acceptable. Terrain relief that is ideal for the science obviously poses significant risks for landing, so a new landing capability called Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN) was added to the mission. This talk will describe the scientific goals of the mission, the Terrain Relative Navigation system design and the successful results from landing on February 18th, 2021.[ CMU RI Seminar ] Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots