Video Friday is your weekly selection of great robotics videos, curated by your friends IEEE Spec robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Robotics Summit and Expo: May 10-11, 2023, BOSTON
ICRA 2023: 29 May–2 June 2023, LONDON
RoboCup 2023: 4–10 July 2023, BORDEAUX, FRANCE
RSS 2023: 10-14 July 2023, DAEGU, KOREA
IEEE RO-MAN 2023: 28–31 August 2023, BUSAN, KOREA
CLAWAR 2023: 2-4 October 2023, FLORIANOPOLIS, BRAZIL
Humanoids 2023: 12-14 December 2023, AUSTIN, TX, USA
Enjoy today’s videos!
Inspired by the resilience of bumblebees, MIT researchers have developed a repair technique that allows a bug-sized aerial robot to sustain severe damage to the motors or artificial muscles that power its wings, but still fly effectively.
[ MIT ]
This robot gripper is called the DragonClaw, and do you really need to know anything else?
“Alas, DragonClaw wins again!”
[ AMTL ]
Here’s a good argument for having legs on a robot.
And here’s a bit of a good argument for having legs on a robot, but still impressive.
[ ANYbotics ]
It’s always fun to see drones doing real work. Also, when you offer to test your drone on a power line and promise it won’t crash into anything, that’s a trust.
[ Skydio ]
Voxel robots have been widely modeled because they are easy to simulate, but not widely built because they are difficult to build. But here are some that actually 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 the RL policy directly predicts joint torques at high frequency, thus bypassing the use of a PD controller. The proposed learning torque control framework is validated by large-scale experiments in which the quadrilateral can traverse various terrains and withstand external disturbances following user-defined commands.
[ Berkeley ]
In this work, we show how a bio-inspired, 3D-printed snake skin enhances the friction anisotropy and thus the sliding motion of a snake robot. Experiments were conducted with the soft pneumatic snake robot in various indoor and outdoor environments.
[ Paper ]
For bipedal humanoid robots to operate successfully in the real world, they must be competent to perform multiple locomotion tasks simultaneously while responding to unpredictable external perturbations in real time. We propose Kinodynamic Fabrics as an approach for real-time specification, resolution, and simultaneous execution of multiple motion tasks while responding to environmental dynamism.
[ Michigan Robotics ]
The RPD 35 from Built Robotics is the world’s first autonomous stacking system. It combines four steps: layout, stack allocation, stack driving, and as-built into one package. With the RPD 35, a crew of two can install more productivity than traditional methods.
[ Built Robotics ]
This work contributes a new and modularized learning-based method for aerial robots navigating cluttered environments containing hard-to-perceive thin obstacles without assuming access to a map or full estimation of the robot’s position.
[ ARL ]
Thank you, Kostas!
The video shows a use case developed by FZI with the help of KIT, a multi-robot search for hazardous materials using two FZI robots as well as a KIT virtual reality environment.
[ FZI ]
Satisfying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e7_ANDktBA
[ Soft Robtics ]
It’s been a year since ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover mission was suspended, but work hasn’t stopped for Europe’s ExoMars teams. In this program, the ESA Web TV crew returns to Turin, Italy to talk to the teams and watch new experiments with the rover’s Earth twin, Amalia, while the real rover is carefully stored in an ultra-clean room.
[ ESA ]
AWS Robotics Chief Technologist Camilo Buscarone sits down with Ramon Roche in an episode of “Beind the Tech” to share his storied career in robotics. Camilo explains how AWS provides a range of services for robotics developers, from modeling and streaming to basic real-time cloud storage.
[ Behind the Tech ]