Video Friday is your weekly selection of amazing robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE spectrum robotics We also publish a weekly schedule of upcoming robotics events for the coming months. Send us your events to include them.
Robotics Summit and Expo: May 10-11, 2023, BOSTON
ICRA 2023: May 29–June 2, 2023, LONDON
RoboCup 2023: July 4-10, 2023, BORDEAUX, FRANCE
RSS 2023: Jul 10-14, 2023, DAEGU, KOREA
IEEE ROMAN 2023: Aug 28-31, 2023, BUSAN, KOREA
CLAWAR 2023: October 2-4, 2023, FLORIANOPOLIS, BRAZIL
Humanoids 2023: December 12-14, 2023, AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Drawing inspiration from the toughness of bumblebees, MIT researchers have developed repair techniques that allow an insect-sized aerial robot to sustain severe damage to the actuators, or artificial muscles, that drive its wings, yet still fly effectively. .
[ MIT ]
This robotic claw is called DragonClaw, and do you really need to know anything else?
“Ouch, DragonClaw wins again!”
[ AMTL ]
Here’s a good argument for having legs on a robot:
And here’s a less good argument for having legs on a robot, but still, awesome!
[ ANYbotics ]
It’s always nice to see drones doing real work! Also, when you offer your drone for power line inspections and promise it won’t hit anything, that’s trust.
[ Skydio ]
Voxel robots have been extensively simulated because they are easy to simulate, but not exhaustively built because they are difficult to build. But here are some that really work.
[ Paper ]
Thanks Bram!
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a promising approach to develop controllers for quadruped robots. We explore an alternative to the position-based RL paradigm by introducing a torque-based RL framework, where an RL policy directly predicts high-frequency joint torques, thus circumventing the use of a PD controller. The proposed learning torque control framework is validated with extensive experiments, in which a quadruped is capable of traversing various terrains and withstanding external disturbances while following user-specified commands.
[ Berkeley ]
In this paper, we show how bio-inspired 3D-printed snake skins improve the frictional anisotropy and thus the gliding locomotion of a snake robot. Experiments with a soft pneumatic snake robot have been conducted in various indoor and outdoor environments.
[ Paper ]
For bipedal humanoid robots to function successfully in the real world, they must be proficient in simultaneously executing multiple movement tasks while reacting to unforeseen external disturbances in real time. We propose Kinodynamic Fabrics as an approach for the specification, solution, and simultaneous execution of multiple motion tasks in real time while reacting to the dynamism of the environment.
Built Robotics’ RPD 35 is the world’s first autonomous piloting system. It combines four steps (design, pile layout, pile driving and construction) in one package. With the RPD 35, a two-person crew can drive piles with more productivity than traditional methods.
[ Built Robotics ]
This work contributes a novel and modularized method based on learning for aerial robots navigating cluttered environments containing thin and difficult-to-perceive obstacles without assuming access to a map or full estimation of the robot’s pose.
[ ARL ]
Thanks Costas!
The video shows a use case that was developed by FZI with assistance from KIT: multi-robot hazmat recovery using two FZI robots and a KIT VR environment.
[ FZI ]
Satisfying.
[ Soft Robtics ]
It’s been a year since the launch of ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover mission was suspended, but work hasn’t stopped for the ExoMars teams in Europe. In this programme, the ESA Web TV team travels back to Turin, Italy, to speak with the teams and watch further tests being carried out on Amalia, the rover’s Earth twin, while the real rover remains carefully stored in a room ultra clean.
[ ESA ]
Camilo Buscaron, Chief Technologist, AWS Robotics sits down with Ramón Roche on this episode of Behind the Tech to share his storied career in the robotics industry. Camilo explains how AWS provides a host of services for robotics developers, from simulation and streaming to basic real-time cloud storage.
[ Behind the Tech ]