Video Friday: A Walking, Wheeling Quadruped

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!):

RoboSoft 2021 - April 12-16, 2021 - [Online Conference] ICRA 2021 - May 30-5, 2021 - Xi'an, China

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

This is a pretty terrible video, I think because it was harvested from WeChat, which is where Tencent decided to premiere its new quadruped robot.

Not bad, right? Its name is Max, it has a top speed of 25 kph thanks to its elbow wheels, and we know almost nothing else about it.

[ Tencent ]

Thanks Fan!

Can't bring yourself to mask-shame others? Build a robot to do it for you instead!

[ GitHub ]

Researchers at Georgia Tech have recently developed an entirely soft, long-stroke electromagnetic actuator using liquid metal, compliant magnetic composites, and silicone polymers. The robot was inspired by the motion of the Xenia coral, which pulses its polyps to circulate oxygen under water to promote photosynthesis.

In this work, power applied to soft coils generates an electromagnetic field, which causes the internal compliant magnet to move upward. This forces the squishy silicone linkages to convert linear to the rotational motion with an arclength of up to 42 mm with a bandwidth up to 30 Hz. This highly deformable, fast, and long-stroke actuator topology can be utilized for a variety of applications from biomimicry to fully-soft grasping to wearables applications.

[ Paper ] via [ Georgia Tech ]

Thanks Noah!

Jueying Mini Lite may look a little like a Boston Dynamics Spot, but according to DeepRobotics, its coloring is based on Bruce Lee's Kung Fu clothes.

[ DeepRobotics ]

Henrique writes, I would like to share with you the supplementary video of our recent work accepted to ICRA 2021. The video features a quadruped and a full-size humanoid performing dynamic jumps, after a brief animated intro of what direct transcription is. Me and my colleagues have put a lot of hard work into this, and I am very proud of the results."

Making big robots jump is definitely something to be proud of!

[ SLMC Edinburgh ]

Thanks Henrique!

The finals of the Powered Exoskeleton Race for Cybathlon Global 2020.

[ Cybathlon ]

Thanks Fan!

It's nice that every once in a while, the world can get excited about science and robots.

[ NASA ]

Playing the Imperial March over footage of an army of black quadrupeds may not be sending quite the right message.

[ Unitree ]

Kod*lab PhD students Abriana Stewart-Height, Diego Caporale and Wei-Hsi Chen, with former Kod*lab student Garrett Wenger were on set in the summer of 2019 to operate RHex for the filming of Lapsis, a first feature film by director and screenwriter Noah Hutton.

[ Kod*lab ]

In class 2.008, Design and Manufacturing II, mechanical engineering students at MIT learn the fundamental principles of manufacturing at scale by designing and producing their own yo-yos. Instructors stress the importance of sustainable practices in the global supply chain.

[ MIT ]

A short history of robotics, from ABB.

[ ABB ]

In this paper, we propose a whole-body planning framework that unifies dynamic locomotion and manipulation tasks by formulating a single multi-contact optimal control problem. This is demonstrated in a set of real hardware experiments done in free-motion, such as base or end-effector pose tracking, and while pushing/pulling a heavy resistive door. Robustness against model mismatches and external disturbances is also verified during these test cases.

[ Paper ]

This paper presents PANTHER, a real-time perception-aware (PA) trajectory planner in dynamic environments. PANTHER plans trajectories that avoid dynamic obstacles while also keeping them in the sensor field of view (FOV) and minimizing the blur to aid in object tracking.

Extensive hardware experiments in unknown dynamic environments with all the computation running onboard are presented, with velocities of up to 5.8 m/s, and with relative velocities (with respect to the obstacles) of up to 6.3 m/s. The only sensors used are an IMU, a forward-facing depth camera, and a downward-facing monocular camera.

[ MIT ]

With our SaaS solution, we enable robots to inspect industrial facilities. One of the robots our software supports, is the Boston Dynamics Spot robot. In this video we demonstrate how autonomous industrial inspection with the Boston Dynamics Spot Robot is performed with our teach and repeat solution.

[ Energy Robotics ]

In this week's episode of Tech on Deck, learn about our first technology demonstration sent to Station: The Robotic Refueling Mission. This tech demo helped us develop the tools and techniques needed to robotically refuel a satellite in space, an important capability for space exploration.

[ NASA ]

At Covariant we are committed to research and development that will bring AI Robotics to the real world. As a part of this, we believe it's important to educate individuals on how these exciting innovations will make a positive, fundamental and global impact for years to come. In this presentation, our co-founder Pieter Abbeel breaks down his thoughts on the current state of play for AI robotics.

[ Covariant ]

How do you fly a helicopter on Mars? It takes Ingenuity and Perseverance. During this technology demo, Farah Alibay and Tim Canham will get into the details of how these craft will manage this incredible task.

[ NASA ]

Complex real-world environments continue to present significant challenges for fielding robotic teams, which often face expansive spatial scales, difficult and dynamic terrain, degraded environmental conditions, and severe communication constraints. Breakthrough technologies call for integrated solutions across autonomy, perception, networking, mobility, and human teaming thrusts. As such, the DARPA OFFSET program and the DARPA Subterranean Challenge seek novel approaches and new insights for discovering and demonstrating these innovative technologies, to help close critical gaps for robotic operations in complex urban and underground environments.

[ UPenn ]