Video Friday is a weekly selection of amazing robotics videos collected by your friends on IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also publish a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Robotics Summit & Expo: May 10-11, 2023, BOSTON

ICRA 2023: May 29 – June 2, 2023, LONDON

RoboCup 2023: July 4-10, 2023, BORDEAUX, FRANCE

RSS 2023: July 10-14, 2023 DAEGU, SOUTH KOREA

IEEE RO-MAN 2023: August 28-31, 2023 BUSAN, SOUTH KOREA

CLAWAR 2023: October 2-4, 2023, FLORIANOPOLIS, BRAZIL

Humanoids 2023: December 12-14, 2023, AUSTIN, TX.

Enjoy today’s videos!

EYE

[ Atonaton ]

Off-roading presents unique challenges for autonomous driving: steep slopes, ditches, rocks, vegetation, and ever-changing weather patterns. To make sure our software stack is resilient to whatever it may encounter, we are constantly testing and learning in the field. This video shows excerpts from our field activity in late 2022 and early 2023, including our initial work with fully unoccupied vehicles.

Some of the real DARPA Grand Challenge vibes are here, except these robots go where they don’t need roads.

UW Off-Road Autonomous Driving – From Difficult Terrain to Fast Track | DARPA funded researchwww.youtube.com

[ UW ]

On April 2, 2023, IHMC participated in National Robotics Week by opening its doors to the public. Prior to the global events of 2020, the IHMC Robotics Open Day was an annual event. This year, for the first time since then, the organization was able to participate in National Robotics Week. Academic activity is at the heart of IHMC’s mission and, of course, our entire organization is incredibly grateful for the opportunity to continually inspire future generations.

[ IHMC ]

Thanks William!

Inspired by the adaptable nature of the organic brain, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have unveiled a method to enable robust piloted navigation agents to cope with vision-based target flight tasks in challenging, unfamiliar environments. Fluid neural networks, which can constantly adapt to new inputs, have shown adeptness at making robust decisions in unknown areas such as forests, urban landscapes, and environments with added noise, rotation, and occlusion. These adaptable models, which have outperformed many current counterparts in navigational tasks, could enable potential real-world drone applications such as search and rescue, delivery, and wildlife surveillance.

[ MIT ]

Half a century since the concept of the cyborg was introduced, digital cyborgs, brought about by the spread of wearable robotics, have recently been the focus of much research. We present JIZAI ARMS, a supernumerary robotic limb system consisting of a wearable base unit with six terminals and detachable, user-controlled arms.

[ CHI 2023 ]

This video shows a series of experiments conducted at West Virginia University to rescue a stuck rover using another rover. All experiments were carried out with remote control by three operators: two all-terrain vehicle drivers and a manipulator operator.

[ WVUIRL ]

It still seems wild to me that quadrupeds are good enough now that there are so many viable use cases for them.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

What can robots actually do… today? Can they help the average person beat the high jumper? Test Lab is a new game series from Michigan Robotics. They will test the robots to see how far they have come and how far they still have to go. The first part is devoted to powered exoskeletons. These robotic exoskeletons can help a wide range of users, from manual laborers to those who need assistance with mobility and the elderly. Can he do something more easily measurable, like jumping?

[ Neurobionics Lab ]

CYBATHLON Challenges took place on March 29, 2023. It was attended by 15 teams in 5 different disciplines. Teams have brought incredible advances in assistive technology to the competition.

[ Cybathlon ]

It’s time to ride again (or walk, crawl…). Mobot (Mobile Autonomous Robots) is 29 years old – with new solutions, smart ideas and great competitors (in all disciplines). And not all mobots need to have wheels. The issue is still a good one and creates posting challenges for newbies and experts alike. There is no one way to build a Mobot!

[ Mobot ]

This Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute (CMU RI) workshop is presented by JPL’s Vandi Verma on “Martian Robotics and Robotics at NASA JPL”.

In this seminar, I will talk about Martian robots, the unprecedented results of the last mission to Mars, and how we got there. Perseverance’s manipulation and sampling systems collected samples from unique locations twice as fast as any previous mission. 88% of all driving was autonomous. This allowed the mission to achieve its main goal of selecting, anchoring and placing a valuable collection of samples on the Martian surface within one Martian year after landing. The Ingenuity helicopter has made 49 flights to Mars. I will present an overview of robotics at JPL and talk about some open problems that could improve future space robotics even further.

[ CMU RI ]