Video Friday: The Coolest Robots
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today's videos!
We've just relaunched the IEEE Robots Guide over at RobotsGuide.com, featuring new robots, new interactives, and a complete redesign from the ground up. Tell your friends, tell your family, and explore nearly 250 robots in pictures and videos and detailed facts and specs, with lots more on the way!
The qualities that make a knitted sweater comfortable and easy to wear are the same things that might allow robots to better interact with humans. RobotSweater, developed by a research team from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, is a machine-knitted textile skin" that can sense contact and pressure.
RobotSweater's knitted fabric consists of two layers of conductive yarn made with metallic fibers to conduct electricity. Sandwiched between the two is a net-like, lace-patterned layer. When pressure is applied to the fabric-say, from someone touching it-the conductive yarn closes a circuit and is read by the sensors. In their research, the team demonstrated that pushing on a companion robot outfitted in RobotSweater told it which way to move or what direction to turn its head. When used on a robot arm, RobotSweater allowed a push from a person's hand to guide the arm's movement, while grabbing the arm told it to open or close its gripper. In future research, the team wants to explore how to program reactions from the swipe or pinching motions used on a touchscreen.
[CMU]
DEEP Robotics Co. yesterday announced that it has launched the latest version of its Lite3 robotic dog in Europe. The system combines advanced mobility and an open modular structure to serve the education, research, and entertainment markets, said the Hangzhou, China-based company.
Lite3's announced price is US $2,900. It ships in September.
Estimating terrain traversability in off-road environments requires reasoning about complex interaction dynamics between the robot and these terrains. We propose a method that learns to predict traversability costmaps by combining exteroceptive environmental information with proprioceptive terrain interaction feedback in a self-supervised manner. We validate our method in multiple short- and large-scale navigation tasks on a large, autonomous all-terrain vehicle (ATV) on challenging off-road terrains, and demonstrate ease of integration on a separate large ground robot.
This work will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023) in London next week.
Thanks, Mateo!
Sheet Metal Workers' Local Union 104 has introduced a training course on automating and innovating field layout with the Dusty Robotics FieldPrinter system.
Apptronik has half of its general-purpose robot ready to go!
The other half is still a work in progress, but here's progress:
A spotted-lanternfly-murdering robot is my kind of murdering robot.
[FRC]
ANYmal is rated IP67 for water resistance, but this still terrifies me.
Check out the impressive ankle action on this humanoid walking over squishy terrain.
Wing's progress can be charted along the increasingly dense environments in which we've been able to operate: from rural farms to lightly populated suburbs to more dense suburbs to large metropolitan areas like Brisbane, Australia; Helsinki, Finland; and the Dallas Fort Worth metro area in Texas. Earlier this month, we did a demonstration delivery at Coors Field-home of the Colorado Rockies-delivering beer (Coors of course) and peanuts to the field. Admittedly, it wasn't on a game day, but there were 1,000 people in the stands enjoying the kickoff party for AUVSI's annual autonomous systems conference.
[ Wing ]
Pollen Robotics' team will be going to ICRA 2023 in London! Come and meet us there to try teleoperating Reachy by yourself and give us your feedback!
[ Pollen Robotics ]
The most efficient drone engine is no engine at all.
[ MAVLab ]
Is your robot spineless? Should it be? Let's find out.
[ UPenn ]
Looks like we're getting closer to that robot butler.
[ Prisma Lab ]
This episode of the Robot Brains podcast features Raff D'Andrea, from Kiva, Verity, and ETH Zurich.
[ Robot Brains ]