Video Friday: Robot Blows Up a Land Mine

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

3 min read

Erico Guizzo is IEEE Spectrum's Digital Innovation Director.

SREHD is a semi-autonomous mine and IED detection system that provides the ability to remotely detect, mark, and optionally neutralize buried, metallic and low metallic mines, bulk explosives, and various IED components
SREHD (Standoff Robotic Explosive Hazard Detection) is a semi-autonomous robot that can detect and neutralize buried mines and IEDs.
Image: Carnegie Robotics via YouTube

We have a relatively brief Video Friday for you this week, because we’ve spent all week at ICRA in Montreal. Next week, look for lots of ICRA content, along with a special ICRA edition Video Friday.

URC 2019 – May 30-1, 2019 – Hanksville, Utah
Dynamic Walking 2019 – June 3-6, 2019 – Canmore, Alberta, Canada
2nd Annual Robotics Summit & Expo – June 4-6, 2019 – Boston, Mass., USA
ICUAS 2019 – June 11-14, 2019 – Atlanta, GA, USA
Energy Drone Coalition Summit – June 12-13, 2019 – Woodlands, Texas, USA
RSS 2019 – June 22-26, 2019 – Freiburg, Germany
Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics – June 23-26, 2019 – London, UK
ETH Robotics Summer School – June 27-1, 2019 – Zurich, Switzerland
MARSS 2019 – July 1-5, 2019 – Helsinki, Finland

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.

Detecting mines is an ideal application for small mobile robots, and Carnegie Robotics is making it easier by adding (supervised) autonomy to its Standoff Robotic Explosive Hazard Detection (SREHD) robot.

[ Carnegie Robotics ]

Thanks Matt!

Self racing cars is an autonomous racing series that just about anyone can get involved in. It takes place on a closed raceway, which is the kind of test environment that might be hard to access otherwise.

[ Self Racing Cars ]

In 1915, the engineers Hammond & Miessner designed an electric dog with sensors so it could follow light sources.

In 2018, the Palais de la Découverte asked Pollen Robotics to replicate the first robot in human history so it can be exhibited again. Mainly made with wood, Fully functional, it tells kids and parents a bit about sciences and reminds us how robots have always been part of our history.

[ Pollen Robotics ]

Tethers Unlimited is working on a few different versions of their Kraken robot arm—one is for CubeSats, but this larger one is targeting collaborative applications on the International Space Station.

[ Tethers Unlimited ]

Coming soon from Unitree: a new quadruped that does kinda look like an alien, somehow.

[ Unitree ]

Oh look, a robot that I DO NOT WANT.

[ YouTube ]

NSF-funded Cornell researchers have found a simpler, inexpensive alternative to the expensive LiDAR sensors currently used in self-driving cars to detect objects. The team’s new method, called pseudo-LiDAR, uses two inexpensive cameras to detect objects with nearly LiDAR accuracy.

[ Cornell ]

You probably can't tell (or maybe you can?), but these five robot arms are synchronized to move with millisecond precision.

Brought to you by H-ROS and ROS2.

[ Acutronic Robotics ]

This little agricultural robot is planting rows of corn. What's cool, though, is to see eight of them at once all working together out in a field.

The MARS experiment aims at the development of small and stream-lined mobile agricultural robot units to fuel a paradigm shift in farming practices. The concept addresses looming challenges of today’s large and constantly growing tractor-implement combinations with mainly three aspects. First: to optimize plant specific precision farming, leading to reduced input of seeds, fertilizer and pesticides and to increased yields. Second: to reduce the massive soil compaction as well as energy consumption of heavy machinery. Third: to meet the increasing demand for flexible to use, highly automated and simple to operate systems, anticipating challenges arising from climate change as well as shortage of skilled labour.

[ MARS ]

Whenever we end up back at the Moon or at Mars, robots are going to be doing a bunch of the work on the surface, and the METERON project is figuring out how to make that happen

[ Meteron ]

I hope the 2019 RoboCon competition looks exactly like this rendering.

[ RoboCon ]

Building a robust and maintainable research lab for modern engineering applications is often challenging. Quanser research studios are a perfect response to such challenges, whether your research group is just starting out or you’re looking for ways to expand and enrich an established research program.

[ Quanser ]

Endeavor Robotics, which used to be iRobot, is now FLIR. Which, okay, mergers and acquisitions happen. But when I see a PackBot, I'm pretty much always going to think of iRobot.

[ Endeavor Robotics ]

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a living laboratory to accelerate the development of electric vehicles and connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies. GROVER is a small autonomous bus that uses pulsed laser sensors to move in any direction, with four wheels operating independently, rotating a full 360 degrees.

[ ORNL ]

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