Video Friday: Happy Robot Holidays!

Your weekly selection of awesome (holiday themed) robot videos

3 min read

Erico Guizzo is IEEE Spectrum's Digital Innovation Director.

FZI happy robot holidays
Image: FZI via YouTube

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

Robotic Arena – January 12, 2019 – Wrocław, Poland
RoboDEX – January 16-18, 2019 – Tokyo, Japan

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

Happy holidays from Harvard SEAS!

[ Harvard ]

Happy holidays from PAL Robotics!

[ PAL Robotics ]

Thanks Judith!

Happy holidays from the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich!

[ ASL ]

Happy holidays from RoMeLa!

[ RoMeLa ]

Happy holidays from the Robotic Systems Lab (RSL) at ETH Zurich!

[ RSL ]

Thanks Marko!

Happy holidays from Hebi Robotics!

[ Hebi Robotics ]

Happy holidays from Quanser!

[ Quanser ]

Happy holidays from Reach Robotics!

[ Reach Robotics ]

Happy holidays (I guess?) from Robotnik!

[ Robotnik ]

Happy holidays from ArtiMinds Robotics!

Watch how ArtiMinds helps Santa to save Christmas. In this video we used our intuitive robot programming suite, ArtiMinds RPS, and our newest data collecting software, ArtiMinds LAR.

[ ArtiMinds ]

Happy holidays from Fanuc!

[ Fanuc ]

Happy holidays from the Advanced Algorithms for Control and Communications group at Czech Technical University in Prague!

[ AA4CC ]

We posted FZI’s incredible holiday video last week, but here’s how they put it all together.

[ FZI ]

Don’t let this holiday season pass by without creating your own Sphero-powered holiday art! This program shows you how to easily create some cheerful long exposure light art such as a tree, star, gingerbread man (or lady), or a candle using the Draw canvas of the Sphero Edu app. Create your holiday masterpiece using the Draw canvas, then get a separate smart device with a long exposure app or a fancy camera with slow shutter settings to capture the program running in low light.

[ Sphero ]

HAMR-E, created in collaboration with Rolls-Royce, is a micro-robot that uses electroadhesion to scale vertical, inverted, and curved surfaces, allowing it to explore spaces that are too small for humans. HAMR-E could one day be used to inspect jet engines and other complicated machines without requiring them to be taken apart.

[ Harvard Wyss ]

Brad tele-operates our robot Victor to make a pancake. Cutting edge? Perhaps. Delicious? Definitely.

[ ARM Lab ]

Thanks Dan!

NASA’s NASA’s InSight has been busy. After landing on the Red Planet, the mission sent home pictures and sound, then placed its first instrument on the planet’s surface. Plus, find out what the Curiosity rover has been up to.

[ NASA ]

This concept robot from Synapse illustrates how embodiment and spatial awareness can make digital assistants much more useful.

It’s an interesting concept, but I’m not sure that a robot would be more effective than (say) putting a bunch of stereo cameras or something around your house. Although, at least you would know that if the robot wasn’t in the same room as you, you wouldn’t be being watched.

[ Synapse ]

Thanks Tandy!

Are suction cups a paradigm shift in robotics? Sure, maybe!

[ Chris Atkeson ]

Digital Farmhand is a modular low-cost platform designed to assist smallholder farmers in improving their productivity and yields, and ultimately provide a more reliable income amidst changing markets and climates. In its simplest form it is a small electric tractor-like vehicle that can tow a variety of implements such as seeders, weeders and bed preparation tools. The Digital Farmhand can also use accessible smartphone technologies along with AI to provide crop analytics such as yield estimation, pest and disease identification, as well as precision automation of many labour intensive farm tasks, e.g. weeding, spraying and seeding.

[ Digital FarmHand ]

Pieter Abbeel is a professor at UC Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and is one of the top researchers in the world working on how to make robots understand and interact with the world around them, especially through imitation and deep reinforcement learning.

[ Lex Fridman ]

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