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 two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):
AUVSI Xponential – May 8-11, 2017 – Dallas, Texas, USA
AAMAS 2017 – May 8-12, 2017 – Sao Paulo, Brazil
Austech – May 9-12, 2017 – Melbourne, Australia
Innorobo – May 16-18, 2017 – Paris, France
Midwest Robotics Workshop – May 18-19, 2017 – Chicago, IL, USA
NASA Robotic Mining Competition – May 22-26, 2017 – NASA KSC, Fla., USA
IEEE ICRA – May 29-3, 2017 – Singapore
University Rover Challenge – June 1-13, 2017 – Hanksville, Utah, USA
IEEE World Haptics – June 6-9, 2017 – Munich, Germany
NASA SRC Virtual Competition – June 12-16, 2017 – Online
ICCV 2017 – June 13-16, 2017 – Venice, Italy
RoboBoat 2017 – June 20-20, 2017 – Daytona Beach, Fl., USA
Aerial Robotics International Research Symposium – June 21-22, 2017 – Toronto, ON, Canada
Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics – June 25-28, 2017 – London, England
Autonomous Systems World – June 26-27, 2017 – Berlin, Germany
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos.
This is Walt, Audi's new collaborative robot. Isn’t it cute and wiggly?
As part of a Flemish research project lead by prof. An Jacobs (BruBotics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel) the Audi Brussels factory introduced its very first collaborative robot, an MRK Systeme cobot. The focus of the research project, which was led by sociologists, was to create a more natural human-robot collaboration and to make the workers willing to collaborate with the robot.
[ ClaXon ] via [ Slightly Overdone ]
Thanks Lennert!
Augmented Reality for Kilobots (ARK) is a system that makes Kilobots more useful by allowing them to physically react to virtual features:
As you've probably guessed, this research will be presented at IROS 2017, but you can get a peek at the paper at the website below.
DARPA is interested in swarm technologies, and luckily for them, drones have advanced to the point where it's possible to do some really interesting stuff with software on physical robots without having to worry about the hardware. One of the greatest things about DARPA is how they encourage progress through challenges and competitions, and the Service Academies Swarm Challenge Live-Fly Competition gave three U.S. military service academies an enormous pile of quadrotor and fixed-wing drones, some airspace, and games to play:
Here's how the games worked:
The United States Naval Academy bested West Point and the U.S. Air Force to win. My advice? Next time, add lasers and FPV cameras.
Happy birthday (and congratulations!) to ROS-Industrial, which is now 5!
[ ROS-I ]
That clever robotic airbag system is the winner of the Kuka Innovation Award 2017:
And here are the other finalists:
After watching this video, I'm not sure whether Engineered Arts would be the best place to work, or the worst:
Fun fact: thrown oranges are a universal e-stop for robots.
[ Engineered Arts ]
Thanks Michael!
This video shows IHMC's exoskeleton progress, from 2010 to 2016, concluding with their second place finish in the Cybathlon.
As jaded as I sometimes get on robotics, this sort of thing never fails to be awesome.
[ IHMC ]
If you were at the University of Texas at Arlington for National Robotics Week, you've seen this all already. For everyone else, here's what you missed:
Good to see there's still a PR2 out there rockin' fist bump explode.
[ UTARI ]
I want ALL of these TurtleBot 3s. ALL OF THEM!
[ TurtleBot 3 ]
If you work at Kuka, I guess this is what your life is like?
[ Kuka ]
Waste sorting: It's important, it's dirty, it's a job for robots.
[ ZenRobotics ]
It might be a bit of a stretch to call this a robot, but it looks like it would be fun to have around during the summer:
[ Howe & Howe ]
WeRobotics’ first Business Incubation program is organized at Nepal Flying Labs in early 2017. Starting with an “Ideation” phase in January, Nepal Flying Labs and our partners motivated young engineers throughout the country to brainstorm on how they can build their own business using drones creating new services. 37 teams put in ideas and we invited 19 teams with the most feasible ideas to pitch them at an official pitching day. The jury elected the 4 finalist teams with the most promising ideas.
[ WeRobotics ]
Keenan Wyrobek, Zipline's head of engineering, gave a talk at CITRIS at UC Berkeley all about medical drone delivery in Rwanda. He shares a bunch of interesting anecdotes, and some fun videos we'd never see before, so it's definitely worth a watch if you're in favor of delivery drones that are actually useful.
For more on Zipline, make sure to check out our recent article.
[ Zipline ]
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.
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.
