I love the folks at DLR, the German Aerospace Center, because I always suspected that while building some of the most incredible robots they still could find time to have fun. My suspicion is now confirmed: A DLR engineer just emailed me the video below, noting that it was made "to show that working in robotics also means a lot of fun." Indeed!
The star of the movie is the DLR Crawler, a six-legged robot that the researchers use to develop autonomous vision-based navigation. Apparently the Crawler was feeling lonely in the vast lab and set out to make friends, eventually meeting the DLR humanoid robot Justin, which was practicing its ball-catching skills, and the DLR Hand-Arm-System, which was enduring yet more torture tests in the name of science.
Watch:
Image and video: DLR
Erico Guizzo is the Director of Digital Innovation at IEEE Spectrum, and cofounder of the IEEE Robots Guide, an award-winning interactive site about robotics. He oversees the operation, integration, and new feature development for all digital properties and platforms, including the Spectrum website, newsletters, CMS, editorial workflow systems, and analytics and AI tools. An IEEE Member, he is an electrical engineer by training and has a master’s degree in science writing from MIT.
