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, KOREA

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

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

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

Enjoy today’s videos!

Inspired by the endurance of bumblebees, MIT researchers have developed repair methods that allow a beetle-sized flying robot to severely damage the actuators or artificial muscles that power its wings, yet still fly efficiently.

[ MIT ]

This gripper robot is called DragonClaw and is there anything else you really need to know?

“Alas, Dragonclaw wins again!”

[ AMTL ]

Here is a good argument for having legs on a robot:

And here is a less convincing argument in favor of the robot having legs, but still impressive!

[ ANYbotics ]

It’s always nice to see drones doing real work! Also, when you offer your drone to check power lines and promise it won’t crash into anything, that’s confidence.

[ Skydio ]

Voxel robots have been widely modeled because they are easy to model, but not widely constructed because they are difficult to build. But here are a few that really work.

[ Paper ]

Thanks Bram!

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach to developing controllers for quadrupedal 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, thereby bypassing the use of a PD controller. The proposed torque control structure has been validated by extensive experiments in which a quadruped is able to traverse various terrain and resist external disturbances by following user-specified commands.

[ Berkeley ]

In this paper, we show how the 3D printing of a biotechnology-inspired snake skin enhances the anisotropy of friction and hence the gliding locomotion of a snake robot. Experiments were carried out with a soft pneumatic snake robot in various indoor and outdoor conditions.

[ Paper ]

For bipedal humanoid robots to be successful in the real world, they must be able to perform multiple motion tasks simultaneously, responding to unforeseen external disturbances in real time. We offer Kinodynamic Fabrics as an approach to specifying, solving and simultaneously executing multiple motion tasks in real time, in response to environmental dynamics.

[ Michigan Robotics ]

The RPD 35 from Built Robotics is the world’s first self-contained piling system. It combines four steps—planning, piling, piling, and assembly—into one package. With the RPD 35, a two-man crew can install piles more productively than traditional methods.

[ Built Robotics ]

This work proposes a new and modular learning method for airborne robots navigating cluttered environments containing difficult-to-perceive thin obstacles without access to a map or a complete assessment of the robot’s posture.

[ ARL ]

Thanks Kostas!

The video shows a use case developed by FZI with assistance from KIT: multi-robot hazmat retrieval using two FZI robots and KIT’s virtual reality environment.

[ FZI ]

Satisfactorily.

[ Soft Robtics ]

It’s been a year since the launch of ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover was put on hold, but the work of the ExoMars team in Europe hasn’t stopped. In this program, the ESA WebTV team returns to Turin, Italy to speak with the teams and watch new tests with the rover’s Earth twin Amalia take place, while the real rover is meticulously stored in an ultra-clean room.

[ ESA ]

Camilo Buscaron, Chief Technology Officer, AWS Robotics, chats with Ramon Roche on Behind the Tech to talk about his legendary career in the robotics industry. Camilo explains how AWS provides many services for robotics developers, from simulation and streaming to basic real-time cloud storage.

[ Behind the Tech ]