Friday Video is your great weekly pick Robotics Videos collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum Robotics. We also publish a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. please Send us your events to be included.
Robotics Summit and Expo: May 10-11, 2023, Boston
ICRA 2023: 29 May – 2 June 2023, London
Robocop 2023: 4-10 July 2023, Bordeaux, France
RSS 2023: July 10-14, 2023, Daegu, Korea
IEEE RO-MAN 2023: August 28-31, 2023, Busan, Korea
Color 2023: October 2-4, 2023, Florianópolis, Brazil
Humans 2023: December 12-14, 2023, Austin, Texas, USA
Enjoy today’s videos!
Inspired by the toughness of bumblebees, MIT researchers have developed repair techniques that enable an insect-sized aerial robot to withstand severe damage to the actuators, or artificial muscles, that power its wings — but still fly effectively.
[ MIT ]
This gripping robot is called DragonClaw, and do you really need to know anything else?
Unfortunately, DragonClaw wins again!
[ AMTL ]
Here’s a good argument for having legs on a robot:
Here’s a less good argument for having legs on a robot, but still impressive!
[ ANYbotics ]
It’s always nice to see drones get real work done! Also, when you show your drone power line checks and promise it won’t hit anything, that’s confidence.
[ Skydio ]
Voxel bots have been widely simulated because they are easy to simulate, but not built on a large scale due to their difficulty in building. But here are some that actually work.
[ Paper ]
Thanks Bram!
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a promising approach for developing controllers for quadrupedal robots. We explore an alternative to the position-based RL model, by introducing a torque-based RL framework, where the RL policy directly predicts a joint torque at a high frequency, thus circumventing the use of a PD controller. The proposed learning framework for torque control is validated through extensive experiments, whereby a tetrapod is able to traverse different terrains and resist external perturbations while following user-specified commands.
[ Berkeley ]
In this work we show how nature-inspired, 3D-printed snake skins enhance friction anisotropy and thus the gliding motion of a snake robot. Experiments with a soft air snake robot have been conducted in many indoor and outdoor settings.
[ Paper ]
To walk on two feet Humanoid robots To operate successfully in the real world, they must be proficient in executing multiple motion tasks simultaneously while responding to unexpected external disturbances in real time. We propose kinedynamic fabrics as an approach to specification, solution, and simultaneous execution of multiple movement tasks in real time while interacting with the dynamism in the environment.
The RPD 35 from Built Robotics is the world’s first stand-alone piling system. It combines four steps—planning, pile distribution, pile driving, and masonry—in one package. With the RPD 35, a two-man crew can install a more productive stack than with traditional methods.
[ Built Robotics ]
This work contributes a novel, modular learning-based approach to aerial robots that navigate crowded environments containing subtle, hard-to-perceive obstacles without assuming map access or full positional estimation of the robot.
[ ARL ]
Thanks Kostas!
The video shows a use case developed by FZI with the help of KIT: multi-robot recovery of hazardous materials using two FZI robots plus a KIT virtual reality environment.
[ FZI ]
Satisfying.
[ Soft Robtics ]
It’s been a year since ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover mission was put on hold, but the ExoMars teams in Europe haven’t stopped working. In this programme, the ESA Web TV crew travels to Turin, Italy to talk to the teams and watch new tests being carried out with the twin Earth rover Amalia while the real rover remains neatly stored in a spotless room.
[ ESA ]
Camilo Buscarone, Chief Technologist, AWS Robotics sits down with Ramon Roche on this Behind the Tech episode to share his career in the robotics industry. Camilo explains how AWS offers a range of services to bot developers from simulation and streaming to basic real-time cloud storage.
[ Behind the Tech ]
