#435646 Video Friday: Kiki Is a New Social Robot ...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!): DARPA SubT Tunnel Circuit – August 15-22, 2019 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USAIEEE Africon 2019 – September 25-27, 2019 – Accra, GhanaISRR 2019 – October 6-10, 2019 – Hanoi, VietnamRo-Man 2019 – October 14-18, 2019 – New Delhi, IndiaHumanoids 2019 – October 15-17, 2019 – Toronto, CanadaARSO 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – Beijing, ChinaROSCon 2019 – October 31-1, 2019 – MacauLet us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos. The DARPA Subterranean Challenge tunnel circuit takes place in just a few weeks, and we’ll be there! [ DARPA SubT ]
If you haven’t read our interview with Matt Robinson, now would be a great time, since he’s one of the folks at JPL who designed this arm. [ Mars 2020 ] Kiki is a small, white, stationary social robot with an evolving personality who promises to be your friend and costs $800 and is currently on Kickstarter. The Kickstarter page is filled with the same type of overpromising that we’ve seen with other (now very dead) social robots: Kiki is “conscious,” “understands your feelings,” and “loves you back.” Oof. That said, we’re happy to see more startups trying to succeed in this space, which is certainly one of the toughest in consumer electronics, and hopefully they’ve been learning from the recent string of failures. And we have to say Kiki is a cute robot. Its overall design, especially the body mechanics and expressive face, look neat. And kudos to the team—the company was founded by two ex-Googlers, Mita Yun and Jitu Das—for including the “unedited prototype videos,” which help counterbalance the hype. Another thing that Kiki has going for it is that everything runs on the robot itself. This simplifies privacy and means that the robot won’t partially die on you if the company behind it goes under, but also limits how clever the robot will be able to be. The Kickstarter campaign is already over a third funded, so…We’ll see. [ Kickstarter ] When your UAV isn’t enough UAV, so you put a UAV on your UAV. [ CanberraUAV ] ABB’s YuMi is testing ATMs because a human trying to do this task would go broke almost immediately. [ ABB ] DJI has a fancy new FPV system that features easy setup, digital HD streaming at up to 120 FPS, and <30ms latency. If it looks expensive, that’s because it costs $930 with the remote included. [ DJI ]
DJI’s 2019 RoboMaster tournament, which takes place this month in Shenzen, looks like it’ll be fun to watch, with a plenty of action and rules that are easy to understand. [ RoboMaster ] Robots and baked goods are an automatic Video Friday inclusion. Wow I want a cupcake right now. [ Soft Robotics ] The ICRA 2019 Best Paper Award went to Michelle A. Lee at Stanford, for “Making Sense of Vision and Touch: Self-Supervised Learning of Multimodal Representations for Contact-Rich Tasks.” The ICRA video is here, and you can find the paper at the link below. Cobalt Robotics put out a bunch of marketing-y videos this week, but this one reasonably interesting, even if you’re familiar with what they’re doing over there. [ Cobalt Robotics ] RightHand Robotics launched RightPick2 with a gala event which looked like fun as long as you were really, really in to robots. Thanks Jeff!
[ DLR ] You’ll probably need to turn on auto-translated subtitles for most of this, but it’s worth it for the adorable little single-seat robotic car designed to help people get around airports. [ ZMP ] In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per speaks with Gonzalo Rey from Moog about their fancy 3D printed integrated hydraulic actuators.
[ Robots in Depth ]
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