Evan Ackerman is IEEE Spectrum’s robotics editor.
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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!
If the Italian Institute of Technology’s iRonCub3 looks this cool while learning to fly, just imagine how cool it will look when it actually takes off!
Hovering is in the works, but this is a really hard problem, which you can read more about in Daniele Pucci’s post on LinkedIn.
[ LinkedIn ]
Stanford Engineering and the Toyota Research Institute achieve the world’s first autonomous tandem drift. Leveraging the latest AI technology, Stanford Engineering and TRI are working to make driving safer for all. By automating a driving style used in motorsports called drifting—in which a driver deliberately spins the rear wheels to break traction—the teams have unlocked new possibilities for future safety systems.
[ TRI ]
Researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) have demonstrated that under specific conditions, humans can treat robots as coauthors of the results of their actions. The condition that enables this phenomenon is a robot that behaves in a social, humanlike manner. Engaging in eye contact and participating in a common emotional experience, such as watching a movie, are key.
[ Science Robotics ]
If Aibo is not quite catlike enough for you, here you go.
[ Maicat ] via [ RobotStart ]
I’ve never been more excited for a sim-to-real gap to be bridged.
[ USC Viterbi ]
I’m sorry, but this looks exactly like a quadrotor sitting on a test stand.
The 12-pound Quad-Biplane combines four rotors and two wings without any control surfaces. The aircraft takes off like a conventional quadcopter and transitions to a more-efficient horizontal cruise flight, similar to that of a biplane. This combines the simplicity of a quadrotor design, providing vertical flight capability, with the cruise efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft. The rotors are responsible for aircraft control both in vertical and forward cruise flight regimes.
[ AVFL ]
Tensegrity robots are so weird, and I so want them to be useful.
Top-performing robots need all the help they can get.
[ Team B-Human ]
And now: a beetle nearly hit by an autonomous robot.
[ WVUIRL ]
Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behavior, we propose a novel design of a robotic leg utilizing fiber-jammed structures as passive compliant mechanisms to achieve variable joint stiffness and damping.
[ Paper ]
I don’t know what this piece of furniture is, but your cats will love it.
[ ABB ]
This video shows a dexterous avatar humanoid robot with VR teleoperation, hand tracking, and speech recognition to achieve highly dexterous mobile manipulation. Extend Robotics is developing a dexterous remote-operation interface to enable data collection for embodied AI and humanoid robots.
[ Extend Robotics ]
I never really thought about this, but wind turbine blades are hollow inside and need to be inspected sometimes, which is really one of those jobs where you’d much rather have a robot do it.
[ Flyability ]
Here’s a full, uncut drone-delivery mission, including a package pickup from our AutoLoader—a simple, nonpowered mechanical device that allows retail partners to utilize drone delivery with existing curbside-pickup workflows.
[ Wing ]
Daniel Simu and his acrobatic robot competed in “America’s Got Talent,” and even though his robot did a very robot thing by breaking itself immediately beforehand, the performance went really well.
[ Acrobot ]
A tour of the Creative Robotics Mini Exhibition at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London.
[ UAL ]
Thanks, Hooman!
Zoox CEO Aicha Evans and cofounder and chief technology officer Jesse Levinson hosted a LinkedIn Live last week to reflect on the past decade of building Zoox and their predictions for the next 10 years of the autonomous-vehicle industry.
[ Zoox ]