Evan Ackerman is IEEE Spectrum’s robotics editor.
Animals hug trees, and now robots can too.
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.
ICRA@40: 23–26 September 2024, ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
IROS 2024: 14–18 October 2024, ABU DHABI, UAE
ICSR 2024: 23–26 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK
Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH
Enjoy today’s videos!
Perching with winged Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has often been solved by means of complex control or intricate appendages. Here, we present a method that relies on passive wing morphing for crash-landing on trees and other types of vertical poles. Inspired by the adaptability of animals’ and bats’ limbs in gripping and holding onto trees, we design dual-purpose wings that enable both aerial gliding and perching on poles.
[ Nature Communications Engineering ]
Pretty impressive to have low enough latency in controlling your robot’s hardware that it can play ping pong, although it makes it impossible to tell whether the robot or the human is the one that’s actually bad at the game.
[ IHMC ]
How to be a good robot when boarding an elevator.
[ NAVER ]
Have you ever wondered how insects are able to go so far beyond their home and still find their way? The answer to this question is not only relevant to biology but also to making the AI for tiny, autonomous robots. We felt inspired by biological findings on how ants visually recognize their environment and combine it with counting their steps in order to get safely back home.
[ Science Robotics ]
Team RoMeLa Practice with ARTEMIS humanoid robots, featuring Tsinghua Hephaestus (Booster Alpha). Fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer match with the official goal of beating the human WorldCup Champions by the year 2050.
[ RoMeLa ]
Triangle is the most stable shape, right?
[ WVU IRL ]
We propose RialTo, a new system for robustifying real-world imitation learning policies via reinforcement learning in “digital twin” simulation environments constructed on the fly from small amounts of real-world data.
[ MIT CSAIL ]
There is absolutely no reason to watch this entire video, but Moley Robotics is still working on that robotic kitchen of theirs.
I will once again point out that the hardest part of cooking (for me, anyway) is the prep and the cleanup, and this robot still needs you to do all that.
[ Moley ]
B-Human has so far won 10 titles at the RoboCup SPL tournament. Can we make it 11 this year? Our RoboCup starts off with a banger game against HTWK Robots form Leipzig!
[ Team B-Human ]
AMBIDEX is a dual-armed robot with an innovative mechanism developed for safe coexistence with humans. Based on an innovative cable structure, it is designed to be both strong and stable.
[ NAVER ]
As NASA’s Perseverance rover prepares to ascend to the rim of Jezero Crater, its team is investigating a rock unlike any that they’ve seen so far on Mars. Deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan explains why this rock, found in an ancient channel that funneled water into the crater, could be among the oldest that Perseverance has investigated—or the youngest.
[ NASA ]
We present a novel approach for enhancing human-robot collaboration using physical interactions for real-time error correction of large language model (LLM) parameterized commands.
Husky Observer was recently used to autonomously inspect solar panels at a large solar panel farm. As part of its mission, the robot navigated rows of solar panels, stopping to inspect areas with its integrated thermal camera. Images were taken by the robot and enhanced to detect potential “hot spots” in the panels.
Most of the time, robotic workcells contain just one robot, so it’s cool to see a pair of them collaborating on tasks.
Thanks, Roman!
Meet Hydrus, the autonomous underwater drone revolutionising underwater data collection by eliminating the barriers to its entry. Hydrus ensures that even users with limited resources can execute precise and regular subsea missions to meet their data requirements.
Those adorable Disney robots have finally made their way into a paper.
[ RSS 2024 ]