Video Friday: Medusai
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!
Made from beautifully fabricated steel and eight mobile arms, medusai can play percussion and strings with human musicians, dance with human dancers, and move in time to multiple human observers. It uses AI-driven computer vision to know what human observers are doing and responds accordingly through snake gestures, music, and light.
If this seems a little bit unsettling, that's intentional! The project was designed to explore the concepts of trust and risk in the context of robots, and of using technology to influence emotion.
[ medusai ] via [ Georgia Tech ]
Thanks, Gil!
On 19 April 2021, NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made history when it completed the first powered, controlled flight on the Red Planet. It flew for the last time on 18 January 2024.
[ NASA JPL ]
Teleoperation plays a crucial role in enabling robot operations in challenging environments, yet existing limitations in effectiveness and accuracy necessitate the development of innovative strategies for improving teleoperated tasks. The work illustrated in this video introduces a novel approach that utilizes mixed reality and assistive autonomy to enhance the efficiency and precision of humanoid robot teleoperation.
Sometimes all it takes is one good punch, and then you can just collapse.
Thanks, Robert!
The new Dusty Robotics FieldPrinter 2 enhances on-site performance and productivity through its compact design and extended capabilities. Building upon the success of the first-generation FieldPrinter, which has printed over 91 million square feet of layout, the FieldPrint Platform incorporates lessons learned from years of experience in the field to deliver an optimized experience for all trades on site.
[ Dusty Robotics ]
Quadrupedal robots have emerged as a cutting-edge platform for assisting humans, finding applications in tasks related to inspection and exploration in remote areas. Nevertheless, their floating base structure renders them susceptible to failure in cluttered environments, where manual recovery by a human operator may not always be feasible. In this study, we propose a robust all-terrain recovery policy to facilitate rapid and secure recovery in cluttered environments.
[ DreamRiser ]
The work that Henry Evans is doing with Stretch (along with Hello Robot and Maya Cakmak's lab at the University of Washington) will be presented at Humanoids this spring.
[ UW HCRL ]
Thanks, Stefan!
I like to imagine that these are just excerpts from one very long walk that Digit took around San Francisco.
Boxing, drumming, stacking boxes, and various other practices...those are the daily teleoperation testing of our humanoid robot. Collaborating with engineers, our humanoid robots collect real-world data from teleoperation for learning to iterate control algorithms.
[ LimX Dynamics ]
The OpenDR project aims to develop a versatile and open tool kit for fundamental robot functions, using deep learning to enhance their understanding and decision-making abilities. The primary objective is to make robots more intelligent, particularly in critical areas like health care, agriculture, and production. In the health care setting, the TIAGo robot is deployed to offer assistance and support within a health care facility.
[ OpenDR ] via [ PAL Robotics ]
[ ARCHES ]
Christoph Bartneck gives a talk entitled Social robots: The end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?"
Professor Michael Jordan offers his provocative thoughts on the blending of AI and economics and takes us on a tour of Trieste, a beautiful and grand city in northern Italy.
[ Berkeley ]