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.
ICRA 2023: May 29 – June 2, 2023, LONDON
Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: June 10-12, 2023, HOUSTON, TX, USA
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
IROS 2023: October 1-5, 2023, DETROIT, MI, USA.
CLAWAR 2023: October 2-4, 2023, FLORIANOPOLIS, BRAZIL
Humanoids 2023: December 12-14, 2023, AUSTIN, TX, USA.
Enjoy today’s videos!
We’ve just relaunched the IEEE Robots site at RobotsGuide.com, featuring new robots, new interactive elements, and a completely redesigned design from the ground up. Tell your friends, your family and explore 250 robots in pictures and videos plus detailed facts and features, and many more will be on the way!
[Robots Guide]
The qualities that make a knitted sweater comfortable and easy to wear are the same qualities that can enable robots to better interact with humans. RobotSweater, developed by a research team at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, is a machine-knitted textile “skin” that can sense contact and pressure.
The RobotSweater jersey consists of two layers of conductive yarn with metal fibers to conduct electricity. Between them is a mesh layer with a lace pattern. When pressure is applied to the fabric – say, from someone’s touch – the conductive thread completes the circuit and is read by sensors. In their study, the team demonstrated that pressing a RobotSweater-equipped companion robot tells it which way to move or which direction to turn its head. When used on a robot arm, the RobotSweater allowed the human arm to be pushed to guide the movement of the arm while the arm grip told it to open or close the grip. In future research, the team wants to explore how to program responses to finger or pinch movements used on a touchscreen.
[CMU]
Yesterday, DEEP Robotics Co. announced the launch in Europe of the latest version of its Lite3 robotic dog. The system combines advanced mobility and an open modular structure to serve the education, research and entertainment markets, the Hangzhou-based Chinese company said.
Lite3’s advertised price is $2,900. Shipping in September.
[Deep Robotics]
Estimating the patency of terrain in off-road conditions requires reasoning about the complex dynamics of the interaction between the robot and this terrain. We propose a method that learns to predict traffic cost maps by combining exteroceptive information about the environment with proprioceptive feedback about interaction with the terrain in a self-monitoring mode. We test our method on several short and large-scale navigation tasks on a large autonomous all-terrain vehicle (ATV) in challenging off-road conditions and demonstrate the ease of integration on a single large ground robot.
This work will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023) in London next week.
[Mateo Guaman Castro]
Thanks Mateo!
Local Sheet Metal Workers Union 104 presented a training course on automation and innovative field layout using the Dusty Robotics FieldPrinter system.
[Dusty Robotics]
Apptronik has half of its general purpose robot ready to go!
The other half is still in progress, but here’s the progress:
[Apptronik]
Spotted Lantern Fly Killer Robot is my type of killer robot.
[FRC]
ANYmal has an IP67 waterproof rating, but it still scares me.
[ANYbotics]
Look at the impressive ankle movement of this humanoid walking through soft terrain.
[CNRS-AIST JRL]
Wing’s progress can be seen in the increasingly dense environments in which we have operated, from rural farms to sparsely populated suburbs, denser suburbs to major metropolitan areas such as Brisbane, Australia, Helsinki, Finland and the Dallas Fort Worth metro. area in Texas. Earlier this month, we hosted a demo delivery at Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies, delivering beer (Coors, of course) and peanuts to the field. True, it was not a game day, but 1000 people gathered in the stands, who enjoyed the party dedicated to the opening of the annual AUVSI Conference on Autonomous Systems.
[ Wing ]
The Pollen Robotics team will go to ICRA 2023 in London! Come and meet us there to try the Reachy remote control yourself and give us your feedback!
[ Pollen Robotics ]
The most efficient drone motor is without a motor at all.
[ MAVLab ]
Is your robot spineless? Should it be? Let’s find out.
[ UPenn ]
Looks like we’re getting close to that robot butler.
[ Prisma Lab ]
This edition of the Robot Brains podcast features Raff D’Andrea of Kiva, Verity and ETH Zurich.
[ Robot Brains ]